The Deep State in deep waters

There have been occasions when I have had the pleasure, a dubious pleasure some might say, of overhearing conversations at unexpected moments and in unexpected places. I have not gone in search of snooping around expecting to pick up spicy gossip from strangers. I am not that kind of person. Things just happen. One minute you are sitting on some park bench trying to empty your mind of all thoughts, a practice yoga masters encourage their students to indulge in but extremely difficult to achieve. Just when you think the last vestiges of thought are beginning to ebb away and your mind is on the cusp of attaining supreme mindlessness, everything is shattered by hearing a voice close to you saying, ‘I say Rajan what do you make of this Deep State thing? What is Deep State anyway? All these years, I never heard anyone mention Deep State, and suddenly that is all I am hearing and reading about. Can you enlighten me?’

That’s it, end of yoga session and mindlessness. I have been called mindless before but not in a good way. Will have to try it again some other time when I am not even remotely close to any form of human habitation. For now, I am all ears tensely waiting to hear what this Rajan, whoever he is, is about to reveal on the mysterious Deep State. Not to be confused with Deep Throat, which is another kettle of fish altogether. I could have ignored the whole conversation and walked off to find another place to sit where no one else was around. I realised soon enough that that was a hopeless task as the park was buzzing with walkers, many with their pet dogs in tow, joggers, clandestine young lovers whispering sweet nothings to each other and people just sitting around gossiping. Then again, they could be Deep State agents pretending to be clandestine young lovers whispering sweet nothings to each other. It was hopeless. I was in a deep state of helplessness. I might as well have been continuing my yogic asanas sitting at home on my toilet seat. For the present, I decided to do what any sensible person would have done in my place. Make the most of a dicey situation. Curiosity might have killed the cat but I decided to enjoy a bit of eavesdropping. One of them was Rajan, as I was able to glean. The other’s name was soon revealed. They might both have been in their mid-to-late forties, prime of life. Intellect as sharp as a tack. At least that was my impression though one of them was floundering while attempting to unravel the depth of meaning involved in the expression Deep State which has gained wide currency in our political patois.

Rajan responds. ‘Look here Dilip. The Americans are the ones who are openly talking about the Deep State. Apparently, the term refers to a machinery within the government that in reality runs the government, as per the dictates of some higher power. Like George Soros for instance, to pick a name out at random. Those occupying the Oval Office or other important offices in the White House merely follow the dictates of these shadowy individuals in the Deep State. Are you with me?’ Reader, you will have observed that I have assigned an upper case to the term Deep State to stress its importance, except when I employ the term in common parlance, like being ‘in a deep state of helplessness.’

Dilip looks perplexed. ‘I hear you Rajan, but I am not sure I follow. These are deep waters. What higher power? What can be more powerful than the President of the United States?’

Rajan sports a knowing smile. ‘That’s all you know, Dilip. The President is merely a rubber stamp. At least, in the party that is currently in charge but soon to relinquish its position. If the Deep State tells Biden to press a red button that will send guided missiles to Russia from Ukraine, he will press that red button.’

‘But look here,’ interjects Dilip agitatedly, ‘if the missile is to go from Ukraine to Moscow, should not Zelenskyy be pressing that red button instead of Biden? Is that not a huge risk? Biden is not well. Have you seen him walk? He might even be colour blind. Age can do that to people. He might press the yellow button instead of the red one, and the missile might just take off from Washington and blow-up New York and most of the east coast. Did you ever think about that?’

‘You have a vivid imagination, Dilip. Biden is not that unwell. He slurs on his words now and then. Says London when he means Leningrad, which could be a problem. He also has a tendency to trip and fall every now and then, but I think we can count on him to press the right button when it really matters. Particularly when some sharp aide from the Deep State will carefully guide his hand and place his finger on the red button. And if he is really feeling under the weather, they could always call on Kamala to do the honours.’

‘Kamala? Kamala Harris? Are you kidding me? Have you taken leave of your senses, Rajan? That lady cannot make a single move without a teleprompter placed in front of her and if it goes on the blink, she is dead in the water. Only if the screen shows in large, capital letters the words ‘PRESS THE RED BUTTON,’ will she tentatively stick her forefinger out. Even then there is every chance she might press the blue button signalling one transatlantic, guided missile to head China-wards. And smiling non-stop the while, all 32 teeth in full glare for the cameras. No, no, she won’t do. Incidentally, have the media approached Kamala for her opinion on the subject?’

‘Of course they have, Dilip, but she is unable to proceed beyond “I come from a middle-class family and my mother brought my sister and I up single-handedly,” after which she freezes up, waiting for the teleprompter to come alive. Ask Oprah Winfrey.’

‘Since you touched upon Biden, Rajan, what about his latest masterstroke of issuing a Presidential pardon to his son Hunter, for all his alleged crimes and misdemeanours? With one stroke of the President’s pen, Hunter is no longer the hunted.’

‘Nice one Dilip, but seriously, if a father cannot forgive his own son, who else is going to? Cut Joe Biden some slack. Blood is thicker than water or haven’t you noticed? Don’t you follow Indian politics? Anyhow, Biden will be quitting office soon. His wife Jill must have given the President hell to get Hunter off the hook, though she is not Hunter’s biological mother. Remember this was Joe’s second marriage.’

‘Perhaps his first wife was turning on the heat? I must say Rajan, you are really well-informed on American politics.’

‘Nothing to it really, Dilip. Fox News, podcasts on YouTube and a bit of Google search is all it takes these days to be up to speed on happenings around the world.’

‘Quite so. And soon, it will be Donald J. Trump to entertain us and make no mistake, he is a far more engaging entertainer than Biden ever was. He has some sexy dance steps as well. And he will push all the right buttons.’

‘In more ways than one, but enough of U.S. politics. It’s getting late, Dilip. Let’s do a quick round-up of important happenings in our own country, shall we.’

‘Why not? Shall we start with the post-election drama in Maharashtra?’

‘We shall start and end with that subject, Dilip. Nothing else has been happening to keep us bored stiff in front of our television sets.’

Dilip stifles a yawn. ‘On second thoughts, I think we should skip this whole Maharashtra mini-epic with its unending suspense on the appointment of a Chief Minister and other partners in the coalition acting like spoilt brats wanting more of the enormous political pie. Fadnavis seems to be the anointed one, the frontrunner but conspiracy theories are flying thick and fast. I am referring to one sulking brat in particular who seems to be extremely adept at playing ducks and drakes. Let the situation unravel and we will meet again to discuss this vexed issue.’

‘You said a mouthful there Dilip. Let us conclude on the American situation. Trump is letting the world know how much respect he holds for people of Indian origin. There’s Vivek Ramaswamy, Kash Patel and Jay Bhattacharya. Not to forget Tulsi Gabbard who hails from Hawaii but everything else about her is not just Indian but Hindu. I saw her on YouTube, kumkum on forehead and strumming a guitar, singing Hare Rama, Hare Krishna, like the late Beatle George Harrison. Not forgetting Usha, the Vice President-elect J.D. Vance’s wife, who might also have a say in policy making. Above all, Trump and Modi love hugging each other.’

‘Last time Trump was in India he even referred to “Swami Viveka-mundan” (sic). He should take lessons from Tulsi. Small wonder the Deep State has been training its guns on the Indian sub-continent. Not to worry, Trump and his ‘Indian’ team will set everything right. Vivek and Mighty Musk have vowed to fight the good fight and clean up the mess.’

At this point, I decided to make my exit. There is just so much politics one can take of a morning. I have also decided that if I want to get an informed opinion on matters of worldwide interest, there is no point in watching television or reading the papers. Just take a stroll in your park and sit yourself down next to a few wise men exchanging thoughts. You will learn much. And, which is more, you’ll be a Man, my son.

The Winter’s Tale

‘Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.’ Shakespeare, Sonnet 73.

The English winter – ending in July, to recommence in August. Lord Byron.

I have been turning my mind to the weather lately. There is just the hint of a cold snap in the air and most of us are rubbing our hands in joyful anticipation at the onset of winter. Now, I do realise that when I casually talk about welcoming winter with the proverbial red carpet rolled out, I speak from an Indian perspective. It’s all very well for Nobel Laureate John Steinbeck to say things like ‘What good is the warmth of summer, without the cold of winter to give it sweetness.’ He is used to wallowing in the cold. I am more on the side of Virginia Woolf who held that ‘Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.’ Then again, she would say that, having weighted her pockets with stones and walked straight into the nearest river, never to surface again.

 Someone reading this in Europe, Russia, the United States or Canada will not take kindly to my wintry observations. In those countries, winter denotes unpleasant things like shovelling snow from your doorstep, heating pipes blocked, water pipes frozen, cars stalling and your pets pooing or peeing inside the house seeing as it’s too cold for them to venture out to do their business. Always assuming that the pets’ pipes are not irrevocably blocked to allow free flow of bodily wastes. In sum, I can only thank the weather gods that I do not live somewhere in the northern hemisphere. Conversely, we do not anticipate our summers here with glee whereas those from far north of the equator can’t get enough of the sun. Clearly, in this instance what is sauce for the goose is not sauce for the gander.

Where I live in Bangalore, we enjoy what the experts call moderate or temperate weather. The winters are mild and pleasant. Our pets return from their walkies outdoors looking very pleased with themselves, having deposited their ordure in front of somebody else’s gates! That said, nowadays most pet owners carry around fancy gizmos to responsibly scoop up the dog turd and dispense with it elsewhere, presumably flush it down their own toilets. Which still leaves us with the problem of stray dogs treating the entire neighbourhood as their public urinal or lavatory, but we shan’t worry our pretty little heads with that for the moment. After all, what do we pay the civic authorities for? Point to ponder – why do we never talk about cats in this context? Think on it.

 If Bangalore’s winters are balmy, the summers are hottish, air-conditioning required at nights for about six to eight weeks tops. Blame it on global warming. I know things are much harsher in the northern parts of India where room heaters and electric blankets are pressed into service during winter and most homes have installed central air-conditioning during the stifling summer months. I shall not entertain some smart-alec, idealistic, bleeding-heart college student shedding crocodile tears asking me ‘What about the poor, huddled masses, who have to sleep on the pavements?’ What about them, indeed? There is not a lot I can do about it though deserving charities do get my modest attention. I am as distressed about their plight as you are, and just as helpless. So go back to your air-conditioned rooms and weep into your goose down pillows (again with the geese) for the unfortunates and dispossessed. Otherwise, go and sleep on the pavements with the masses and show some genuine solidarity. Not unlike what some of our former leaders apparently did to experience what Mahatma Gandhi was going through during his incarceration under the British. If not, hold your peace.

Sorry if I got carried away there. There are times when you, as a writer do not always control the direction in which the narrative takes you. One thought leads to another and you veer slightly off the beaten track. Let me return to the weather. In India we essentially talk about three distinct types of weather patterns – summer, monsoon and winter. Period. Did I hear someone pipe up with, ‘What about our spring festival, Holi?’ In certain English-speaking quarters in India, we do refer to Holi as the spring festival, but go and ask the man on the street what he understands by ‘spring’ in the weather sense. He will look at you blankly, shrug his shoulders and walk on. On the other hand, he might make some passing reference to his bed which has a spring mattress in urgent need of changing as some of the springs are poking out dangerously.

The same goes for autumn. Autumn Leaves is a lovely song by Nat King Cole. Autumn is also referred to as fall, particularly in America, but autumn is the more common currency. Just as well. Fall Leaves does not quite work as a song title. In India we do not see leaves falling gently to be raked in by gardeners. Here we see whole trees fall when thunderstorms and typhoons strike, blocking roads, snapping electric poles, cleaving cars in twain (at times with passengers in them) and generally causing mayhem and power shutdowns. Along the way, many human lives are lost.

So much for the grim side of the weather. Let me look at the lighter side of human behaviour in India with respect to weather changes. In Calcutta, where I lived for many years, winters can be quite chilly during December and January, cold enough to bring out the woollies and the monkey caps. Add to that the fog and smog that envelope the city, leading to respiratory illnesses in every other family. The average denizen of Calcutta, however, goes by the dictates of his calendar, irrespective of weather conditions. November 1st means the full-sleeve sweaters for men and the ladies’ shawls must be brought out in all their finery. So many parties to attend what with Christmas and New Year just round the corner. Never mind that it is still clocking a clammy 32 degrees Celsius in the shade. The wall calendar has declared winter and its commands as to the appropriate attire shall be scrupulously obeyed.

The city of Chennai has three seasons: summer, summer and summer with the barest hint of a cool breeze when the weather gods feel so disposed. Sea breeze, they call it, being located on the coast, but we only have their fabled word for it. Incredibly, some of the Madras-vasis can be spotted wrapping a scarf round their faces and a shawl to cover their torsos while visiting temples early in the morning or attending concerts in the evening at the various sabhas during the famed music season. The acrid, camphor-like, pungent smell of mothballs aka naphthalene balls, spread out for long periods in the almirahs keeping the termites at bay, announces its arrival from several yards away as the shawls swish with the mythical sea breeze.

 As for the state of Kerala, I don’t think they even have a concept of what winter means, even in its mildest form. ‘God’s own country’ is hot and insufferably humid right round the year, and when the rains make landfall with much fanfare to announce the onset of the eagerly-awaited Indian monsoon, it just pours sheets for days and weeks on end. Only the school going children are happy, thanks to the enforced holidays. At the same time, elsewhere in the country the parched earth reels from drought as the suffering millions pray for rains. Top that for tragic irony. Many other Indian cities and towns will have their own tales to narrate about how our changeable weather affects them. I had to confine myself to the metros I have lived in.

That is the Indian weather. In a nutshell. Two extremes. Feast or famine. Take your pick. Rains are good for the crops, but excess of it spells misery, even for the crops. In conclusion, King Leontes in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale exclaimed, ‘Too hot, too hot.’ Not having read the play (and not intending to), I lack context, but it does seem a very odd thing for the good king to say in a tale about winter. Perhaps his menials placed too many logs in the royal fireplace.

Bingeing on subtitles

Subtitles for our worldwide Chinese audience

At the outset, let me make it abundantly clear that my specific focus with respect to this article is on English serials and movies on home television with the aid of subtitles. Home television because I have all but stopped visiting cinema halls, even with our state-of-the-art multiplexes offering plush seats at extortionate rates with facilities to gorge on hamburgers and Cokes even while watching a movie. Those calorific, artery-thickening burgers and chips, blood sugar-enhancing treats, carbonated soft drinks to wash it all down, collectively and rightly dubbed junk food, all costing a bomb for the dubious privilege of partaking in a cinematic feast. The binge watchers and binge eaters are firm in their belief that ogling Brad Pitt and George Clooney ogling J. Lo and Kate Winslet without biting into KFC’s or McDonald’s deep-fried offerings is a complete waste of time. Donald Trump and Elon Musk, gormandizers beyond compare, will heartily endorse that view. English movies, not because I have anything against Hindi or Tamil films but that the latter do not require subtitles. Not for me, at any rate. You may well ask, why do I need the aid of subtitles for English films when I am more than comfortable with the language I was groomed in at a decent boarding school? Good question.

The thing is, in earlier days English movies featured actors who spoke their lines with clarity. It was rather like watching a play where the players needed to ‘throw’ their voices such that it reached the very last row in the stalls as well as those seated in the dress circles in the balcony. Our elocution teachers dinned this into us. The theatrical principle was applied equally to the cinema as the stars enunciated every syllable with great deliberation. Diction ruled ok. Give me a histrionic Peter O’Toole any day over a mumbling Marlon Brando with marbles in his mouth, à la Demosthenes. At least, the Greek orator’s excuse for putting marbles in his mouth was that it cured his stammer. It takes all sorts. Watch O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia giving Arab chieftain Omar Sharif a polished ticking-off: ‘My name is for my friends. None of my friends is a murderer.’ 10 on 10 for grammar and enunciation. Some may have criticised this method of acting as being too stagey, but it was what it was and, more to the point, it obviated the need for subtitles. Method acting is different now. Most of the modern films and television serials which are offered to us at home for our delectation, appear to be under the misapprehension that they are sitting on our laps and whispering into our shell-like ears, though in a literal sense they are. Did I say whispering? Make that mumbling. Whispering and mumbling: a potent combination that cries out for subtitles.

What this means is that for those couch potatoes like me, who sit back for hours in cushioned comfort at home to watch movies or serials (hello lumbar spondylosis), we are free to choose our entertainment of choice in any language. I might as well opt to watch a serial in French, Japanese or German in place of English, since the subtitles have enabled me to broaden my cable horizons. We are now binge-watching polyglots. Happy Valley is a marvellous English crime drama, but set in Yorkshire, the local Geoffrey Boycott-inflected accent makes switching on the subtitles an absolute must. In other words, we are now forced to enjoy English films and serials with English subtitles! Which then gives me a humongous choice to watch a film in any language, even Korean, if the plot and acting are above par. The subtitles give me that liberty. The highly appreciated serial, Pachinko, is a fine example. And with any luck, I can pick up a couple of Korean cuss words which might come in handy if I ever visit Seoul.

Truth to tell, I hated watching anything with subtitles. For the human eye to dart about between the subtitles at the bottom of the screen and quickly revert to the actual dialogue on the screen, this posed challenges well beyond my capacity to cope. Over time, I managed to overcome this handicap. My eyes grew accustomed to rapid-reading the subtitles and still enjoying the action on the screen. I also felt that the experience of having to read text that kept constantly changing to keep pace with the spoken word, was aesthetically less than pleasing. I have had this experience when I attempted to watch something in an Indian language that was foreign to me, if you get my meaning. I don’t even wish to get started on subtitles that outpace the actor’s delivery, leaving the viewer befuddled. Subtitling for films is a subtle art and when they get it just so, once in a rare while, watching films and serials in any language is an undiluted pleasure.

Incidentally I don’t need subtitles, for the most part, if I am watching a Hindi, Tamil or Bengali film, as I am reasonably fluent in those tongues. However, if an arty friend of mine exhorts me to watch some award-winning film in, say, Bhojpuri or Assamese, I should be stumped without subtitles. I should be stumped even with subtitles, but what the hell. One must oblige one’s arty friends now and then. There have been times when, at my prompting, they have had to endure the never-ending Tamil soliloquys of the late thespian, Sivaji Ganesan. Noblesse oblige. I too was subjected during my initial college days in Calcutta, when I barely spoke Bengali, to watching an award-winning Satyajit Ray film about the Bengal famine. At times the film moved so slowly that I thought the projector had stalled and that the projectionist had pushed off for his matka cha and singaras. And possibly a quick drag on his Charminar. Having watched the celluloid famine day in and day out, the poor chap must have been famished at all times of the day. I should have known that was the way with art house films. Then again, Satyajit Ray was God in Calcutta and you dared not be flippant about him. Status of divinity was also accorded to the likes of Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, Truffaut and others of their ilk in the City of Joy.

We are also given the option of watching foreign language films dubbed in a local language, which I feel is misguided. Doubtless it is done with the best of intentions. Why should we not offer the best of Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino mouthing their punch lines in Hindi, Tamil or Telugu? The vast Indian population, fed on a daily diet of Rajani, Salman or Shah Rukh’s antics could be stirred out of their ennui by watching a bit of hyperbolic Pacino in Scarface as he wields his M16 rifle, his nostrils stuffed with cocaine, ‘Say hello to my little friend.’ Dear reader, I will leave you to translate that line in whichever language you feel most at home. Incidentally, I am not a big fan of dubbing. Dubbing does not work for me. Most of the time, we are subjected to dialogues being transliterated, word for word, rather than translated. This often results in hysterical distortions of the meaning that was intended to be conveyed in the original iteration. To say nothing of lip-sync going completely haywire. I would rather the Germans speak in their own Teutonic tongue and let me unscramble the message through the subtitles. Loosely translated, ‘Vazhga Hitler’ in Tamil simply does not have the same authentic ring as ‘Heil Hitler.’

To sum up this contemplation on film subtitles, the absurdity of this exercise is never more starkly displayed than when barely readable lines of text are moronically splashed across our screens when they are clearly surplus to requirements. I am talking about scenes where there is no dialogue and we can arrive at our own conclusions even if we are blessed with only half a brain. A French soldier looks vacantly into the middle distance as the audience is treated to the helpful subtitle, Soldier looks blankly. A cat scurries through an empty room, Cat runs across.  A woman is shown being sick into her toilet, Woman vomits into toilet. A man burps, Man burps. My favourite? As gun-toting villain approaches heroine, on padded feet, stealthily from behind, Threatening music playing. There is a school of thought that subtitles are helpful for the deaf to follow the proceedings. That is dumb. When a person with normal hearing is unable to follow the convoluted logic of subtitles, how do you expect a deaf person to be any the wiser?

I can go on in this vein, but I am done. Now where’s my Director’s Cut DVD of My Fair Lady? I have watched it 63 times since my teens, six times in cinema halls before we knew what a VHS tape or a DVD even looked like. I could do with a bit of the peerless Rex Harrison reprising his stage role as Professor Henry Higgins as he sing-speaks, with crystal clarity, Why can’t the English teach their children how to speak? I won a plastic mug for reciting that at a local club in Calcutta. Furthermore, I will make sure to turn off the subtitle options generously offered in 17 languages: including Swahili.                                       

If you must deny, sound plausible

‘I know nothing. I forget everything.’ Andrew Sachs as Manuel in Fawlty Towers.

The important thing is we maintain plausible deniability. Richard M. Nixon.

The accepted definition of the term ‘plausible deniability’ is the ability to deny knowledge or responsibility for actions taken by others, even if one was involved or at least wilfully ignorant. It’s often used by high-ranking officials to avoid blame when illegal or unpopular activities become public. What a carefully crafted definition this is and how nice for those high-ranking officials that they can stubbornly stick to stout denial with impunity when some wrongdoing or the other comes to light. And not an iota of guilt sticking to them so long as there is a readily available fall guy to carry the can. In India, we call them bakras, or sacrificial goats. One comes across increasing use of this expression (plausible deniability, not bakras) in American or British political thrillers that keep many of us engrossed in front of our television sets. I am not sure if there is an Indian vernacular equivalent for ‘plausible deniability’ but its import and application is something we witness on a regular basis in our country’s rapidly evolving and changing political and corporate scenario. More often than not, the political and the corporate go hand in hand. Or hand in glove, come to that.

Let me attempt to illustrate this through an imagined situation in a government office. An under-secretary in a sensitive ministry decides to import some contraband material through mail order, an act which is clearly illegal. One assumes his motives were sound and in the national interest, to give him the benefit of the doubt. Though every precaution is taken to keep the matter under wraps, truth will out and the minister in charge of the concerned department comes under the scanner as the buck stops with him. However, he is now in the happy position to vehemently deny any involvement in the matter as he is genuinely unaware of what has taken place. If it was brought to his notice later on that one of his underlings was the culprit, he himself shall remain blameless. Pure as the driven snow. When the media searchlight is trained on him, he will be snug as a bug in a rug. And smug as well, I shouldn’t wonder.

That is the theory behind a denial being plausible in high places. In practice there is a more than even chance that everyone up and down the chain of command is secretly aware of the crime, notwithstanding the soundness of the reason for the act. In such a situation, the only real sin was to have got caught with the proverbial hand in the till, a mixed metaphor but a handy euphemism in this case for something more sinister. The fall guy’s lips are sealed as he takes the rap and lives in denial. While he does time in the cooler, he and his family are well looked after till the cows come home. In this case, it is more properly the chickens that have come home to roost. A small price to pay in the long-term interests of the country. Incidentally, I quoted former U.S. President Richard Nixon at the top of this piece who also said, apropos the Watergate scandal, ‘I am not a crook.’ There was not even the slightest hint of plausibility in his denial! If you must lie, keep a straight face.

Nowhere is this situation more apparent than when international spies, for all their cloak-and-dagger cleverness, get caught eavesdropping or peeping through bedroom keyholes at the enemy’s defence minister making nice with a blonde femme fatale. The sort of stuff Frederick Forsyth describes so vividly in The Day of the Jackal. Such a situation, naturally, is ripe for blackmail and the spy from a foreign country is only doing his job. Not very well, one might add. The Peeping Tom analogy is no longer applicable in the advanced technological age in which we operate today. Far more sophisticated equipment can be employed and one can spy unseen and unheard. Which is a shame if you get off on peeping through keyholes, but hey, you can’t have everything.

However, as we are here only to make a point, if the voyeuristic spy is apprehended and sweetly claims he was only getting cheap thrills, he will be frogmarched to the nearest dungeon. After the tried and tested method of gaslighting fails to yield results, they will pull his nails with pliers, apply electric shocks into unmentionable anatomical apertures and give him the waterboarding treatment for good measure. Through all this, he will stick to his story that he was grossly ill-treated as a child, that his nanny lusted after him, all of which led to his perversions, ogling through keyholes being one of his lesser fetishes. Mercifully, for his government that is, he can take the torture no more and dies in his dank cell having kept his country’s honour intact, his lips Fevicol-sealed forever. After he is buried in an unmarked spot, his minister at HQ, on being questioned about the mysterious disappearance of his cultural attaché in Washington, Beijing, Moscow, Toronto, Karachi, London or wherever, can claim he hasn’t a clue who or what they are talking about. Thank God for plausible deniability, as we are witnessing almost every day in real life.

It all then boils down to the vital issue of burden of proof. When it comes to international skullduggery, nothing is ever proven. Only deep suspicions remain and innuendoes strewn about like confetti. No government has ever been unduly worried about suspicions and innuendoes. So long as they can deny plausibly, all will be well. Life goes on. The cardinal thing to remember, even at the cost of repetition is that old axiom, ‘Do not get caught,’ a dictum that some of our own George Smileys have failed to follow. We all know that in the world of intrigue and espionage, spies crawl out of the crumbling woodwork like white ants. They have been thoroughly groomed to blend in with the locals and ensure that their credibility is beyond question. In spite of all this, if they make a false move and blow their cover, on their heads be it.

Spies from different countries rotting in foreign jails are legion. It is cold comfort for an Indian spy to be contemplating a bleak future in a prison cell in Paris or London, daydreaming that the  Champs-Élysées or Lord’s is just three blocks away. His ultimate boss will be speaking nothing less than the truth when he shrugs his shoulders and claims, à la Manuel from Fawlty Towers, ‘I know nothing.’ The same cannot be said of his immediate boss who knew everything but chose to keep things from his big boss, for the latter’s own safety. Plausible deniability in full swing.

I will leave you with a sequence from Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun featuring the peerless secret agent James Bond, which best captures the concept of plausible deniability. Bond’s boss M, is in the chair.

M: “What do you want?”

Royal Navy Officer: “We’ve picked up Goodnight’s signal, sir.”

M: “Well, that’s something.”

Officer: “But there’s something rather curious, sir (points on map). Our sector’s here, and we’re receiving her signal from somewhere off this coastline here. Now, here it is on a much larger scale. That’s where she is. In this group of small islands.”

M: “That’s all we need! Red Chinese waters.”

James Bond: “We could stray inadvertently into them, sir. I could fly low under their radar screen.”

M: “Absolutely out of the question. If the PM gets to hear of this, he’ll hang me from the yardarm.”

Bond: “Officially, you won’t know a thing about it, sir.”

There you have it. Plausible deniability, in a nutshell. Even now I can visualise the style icon of the 60s, Sean Connery delivering those lines laconically in his characteristic Scottish brogue though it was, in fact, Roger Moore who starred in The Man with the Golden Gun as Bond. Along with Moore, many others have played James Bond in subsequent films. Moore and Daniel Craig came close to challenging Connery’s pre-eminent position as the definitive James Bond. Take a poll and we all know who will win hands down. ‘The name is Connery. Sean Connery.’ Legend. Undeniably.

     ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’

In his comedy As You Like It Shakespeare, as is his wont, gave us one of his long declamations, waxing eloquent about Man’s seven ages. I am talking about the ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech. From the newborn baby puking all over the place to the spavined geriatric whose every faculty was being threatened with extinction. In between these two extremes, I am painfully reminded of the whining school boy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school. The play was part of my school syllabus and I am stuck with it. For a comedy, I frankly did not find As You Like It all that funny. Not enough punch lines. At my age I would rather not dwell on intimations of mortality. Perhaps the Bard of Avon intended the play to be a light-hearted romp, portraying his heroines Rosalind and Celia having the time of their lives with the male leads Orlando and Jaques, besides a strong supporting cast. However, old habits die hard and the Bard felt terribly upset when everyone told him tragedies like Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and similar are more his line of country and where his strengths as a playwright lay.

All this traipsing about in the Forest of Arden with funny man Touchstone clowning around mouthing his PJs was not quite cutting it for me.  ‘A poor virgin, sir, an ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own. A poor humour of mine, sir, to take that that no man else will.’ I mean, when the man himself admits to his humour being poor, I have no wish to rub salt into the wound. Which forced Shakespeare to change his tack for As You Like It. He got one of his main characters, the aforementioned Jaques to keep droning on lugubriously about how if you lived long enough you will need to visit a dentist for a complete change of dentures, undergo cataract surgery, be on a permanent diet of bland food and book a slot at your undertakers as the end is near. Or nigh, as the playwright might have had it. As I said, not exactly laugh-out-loud stuff, but the melancholy Jaques’ monologue is ranked among Shakespeare’s top hits, along with ‘To be, or not to be,’ ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen,’ ‘Now is the winter of our discontent’ and ‘Is this a dagger that I see before me?’ Shakespeare was big on monologues. And soliloquys. So brilliant were they that the audience at the famed Globe theatre at times screamed for an encore! They brought the house down. So, who am I to cavil?

You may very well wonder, dear reader, where I am going with all this Shakespeare guff. A red herring it is not, I assure you. The fact is, given that I am not enjoying the first flush of youth, I am partial to a spot of self-indulgent soliloquizing myself, standing in front of the mirror when nobody is around and holding forth, affecting a Laurence Olivier or Richard Burton timbre. The subject of my speech usually being my state of health. I dive into the deep end. The eyes and the ears have not been pulling their weight for some time now. However, the teeth are in fine fettle, that’s a plus. A couple of extractions and implants, and they are as good as new. Thankfully the same can now be said of my eyes. Cataract surgery has taken care of my sight, what with the state-of-the-art lenses. You can present me with a copy of As You Like It (though I won’t thank you for it), printed in 6 point type and I shan’t bat an eyelid, though I would much prefer Uncle Fred in the Springtime. Why opticians insist, while testing your eyes, that you must read inane stuff like ‘The cat bit the rat that sat on the mat’ in varying type heights is beyond my comprehension. Why not cull out of our reverberating Bard’s sonnet, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’ Nevertheless, these were not facilities that the pensive Jaques had at his disposal. Dentists, ENT specialists and eye surgeons, I mean. Books he must have had aplenty – Shakespeare’s Complete Works, for a start. Or ‘books in the running brooks.’ When I tell you that in those bygone days, they employed leeches as the preferred mode of treatment for sucking out infected blood from patients, you can well imagine their plight and Jaques’ dark mood.

Hence the great playwright’s deep contemplation on man’s advancing age, its inevitable depredations and generally negative attitude towards life. Coming back to my health issues, as I said, the teeth are kosher, ditto the eyes. It is the hearing part that I am not quite sure where I stand. I think I can hear perfectly well, but my wife puts a different spin on it. ‘Deaf as a post,’ being a favourite expression of hers, delivered through clenched teeth (her teeth are in mint condition, by the way). That said, I fear she is guilty of making a mountain out of a molehill. I also suspect she deliberately speaks sotto voce to me such that even a person with perfectly sound hearing capability is likely to keep saying, ‘Pardon?’ or ‘Excuse me?’ or a simple, monosyllabic ‘Sorry?’ Not an ‘I am sorry,’ sorry but an ‘I didn’t quite catch that’ sorry. If you are still with me.

It occurs to me, at this point, that deaf people, or should I be sensitive and say ‘the aurally challenged,’ invariably never admit to their handicap. A deaf person, on being asked if he is deaf, is likely to confidently respond by insisting that he is not dead. ‘Very much alive, as you can see, or are you blind?’ I could issue a curt riposte by letting him know that I can see perfectly well having just had my cataract surgically removed, but I worry that he might counter my assurance by saying that he is glad to know my singing contract has been renewed. Unintended non sequiturs frequently slip into the dialogue with those afflicted with impaired hearing. The conversation tends to screech to an abrupt halt after that.

I must make abundantly clear that there is a difference between being stone deaf and being hard of hearing. The former puts you in the ‘no hoper’ category while the latter still gives you a chance to get by and even pretend that you can hear perfectly well. Writers often exploit situations involving deaf people to provide comic relief. Like this example from one of Wodehouse’s gags. Stop me if you’ve heard it before.  “Chap goes up to deaf chap outside the exhibition and says, ‘Is this Wembley?’ ‘Hey?’ says deaf chap. ‘Is this Wembley?’ says chap. ‘Hey?’ says deaf chap. ‘Is this Wembley?’ says chap. ‘No, Thursday,’ says deaf chap.” Whether you think that is funny or not depends entirely on how hard of hearing you are and how fond you are of Wodehouse. Or not. Incidentally, as an aside, from most of my acquaintances who have opted for hearing aids, the verdict is that one is much better off without them than with.

I am fully conscious that we live in extremely sensitive times. People possess very thin skins and are apt to take offence at the merest of slights – real or imagined. One must perforce be constantly tip-toeing on egg shells. Making jokes about folks with handicaps will be taken amiss and you could find yourself debarred from your circle of acquaintances. All because you asked a nice lady you met for the first time at a late evening party if that gentleman wearing dark glasses standing at the other end of the room was making a fashion statement. When she responds that he is not, he is blind and that he is her husband, you hope the floor would cave in and swallow you up.

I had my ears tested recently. The results were inconclusive and the ENT man refused to declare me as certifiably deaf. Bully for me. He asked me to concentrate deeply when someone was addressing me and to preferably look at the person who was talking to me. He did not actually say it but I think he meant, ‘Read my lips.’ I felt cautiously happy about the consult. As I got into the car and drove off with my wife I said, ‘There you are. It’s all good. The doctor just gave me a clean chit and the de-waxing helped.’ As I was expecting a response, I turned to look at her and read her lips as instructed. A dangerous thing to do while driving. Still, I think she said, ‘Bill chef for the bladder and book eight for dinner.’ Then again, it might quite easily have been, ‘Still deaf as an adder and look straight while driving.’ Thanks to all the traffic noise, I couldn’t hear a thing. Shakespeare was remiss in not adding ‘sans ears’ to the quote headlining this piece.

Deepavali and Diwali. One festival. Two facets.

Oil bath terror in south India at 3.30 am

Caveat: This piece was written nearly a decade ago and published in the Deccan Chronicle. It is being presented here with some added embellishments and cosmetic changes. I am counting on the fact that more people would not have read it than have. And among those few who have, only a handful might recall having read it. The passage of time has done little to change anything about how we Indians celebrate Deepavali and Diwali. Read on.

I was born into an orthodox Tamil Brahmin family, and nowhere are the hallmarks of orthodoxy more strictly observed than in our religious festivals. The plethora of rituals almost every month kept me in a constant daze, but the culinary feast that followed each auspicious day, was mouth-watering.  Deepavali, or the festival of lights (and noise), perhaps best typified the rigours and revelries in households such as ours. In Indian mythology Deepavali, amongst other things, symbolically celebrates the demonic Ravana getting his comeuppance against the virtuous Rama – good prevailing over evil, as narrated in the Ramayana. As if you didn’t know.

Let us examine these rigorous practices more closely. Deepavali dawned for our family well before the sun broke blearily over the eastern horizon. We were woken up at about 3.30 am or some such ungodly hour, our faces still deeply sleep-lined. Before we realised what was happening, my mother would pour a ladleful of hot nalla ennai (gingelly oil) on our heads, and thereafter over the rest of our bodies. After allowing the sanctified unguent to soak into our system, we had to have our ‘oil bath,’ and try as we might the sticky, oily feeling never left us for days. Our eyes burned due to the early rising and the well-oiled face, but that was a small price to pay to keep the gods and my mother in good humour. The shikakai podi (Acacia concinna powder) in lieu of soap, only added to the pungent, but not unpleasant, odour we carried around for days on end.

By half-past four, we were dressed to kill in our brand new clothes, usually a half-sleeve, bush shirt and a veshti, which were kept overnight in the prayer room for divine blessings, liberally smeared with sandalwood paste and kungumam (kum kum) the stains of which, like the oil, never left our clothes. After paying our obeisance to all the framed gods and statuettes displayed in the puja room, it was time for some fun, though we were still groggy from sleep deprivation. The cuckoo clock had just tweeted five. ‘Tweeted’ means something entirely different today, but the early cuckoo bird, looking for worms to catch, was ahead of its time.

The ‘fun’ consisted primarily of lighting sparklers and bursting crackers, and various other exciting but potentially dangerous playthings like rockets, chakras and phooljadis (flower pots) that could have been seriously injurious to health. I have never known a single Deepavali pass without some poor child sustaining grievous bodily harm. If not properly supervised, irreparable damage could be done to one’s eyes, and the decibel level of the crackers bursting has caused many a child’s hearing to be permanently impaired. I still believe my brother’s hearing problem was a direct consequence of a pataas going off before he realised the wick had even caught. Thereafter, stuffed with earphones and listening to the brilliant G.N. Balasubramaniam’s Todi or Khambhoji all night long, could only have exacerbated his hearing further. For myself, I exercised adequate caution during the festival, keeping a safe distance from all incendiary objects, even at the risk of being branded a sissy. Discretion was the better part of valour. My valour, at any rate.

Somehow the time had now crept up to 7 am, time for some toothsome bakshanams – crispy crunchies and a variety of sweetmeats. Any other kind of meat was unthinkable! After prostrating before our parents, we were expected to visit neighbouring friends and relatives and seek the blessings of our elders. Our house was also constantly visited by a number of family friends. It was more like a visitation. It must be said that the feeling of gaiety and good cheer was manifest, and the air reeked of a heady admixture of sulphur (from the crackers) and the medicinal but tasty lehiyam, a highly concentrated (and consecrated) paste made of clarified butter and all manner of spices, deliciously sweetened with jaggery – a most efficacious digestive. The Ayurveda chappies are making a killing out of lehiyam.

As an aside, elders in our community greet each other on Deepavali with the Tamil salutation, ‘Ganga snaanam aachaa?’ This refers metaphorically to the much-touted oil bath, the imagined source of the holy water from your tap or shower being the holy of holies, the Ganga or Ganges river. Never mind if the ablution actually took place in your humble bathroom in downtown Chennai. As someone whose name I cannot recall said, ‘Blind faith is the only kind.’ The only Blind Faith I followed as a teenager was a rock band from the 60s!

As the clock crawled towards 10 am, we were all ready for the traditional Deepavali lunch, with all the usual Brahminical fixings topped off with a delicious paayasam. By noon, after the exertions of a long morning, we could not keep our eyes open. The post-prandial afternoon siesta was sound and deep. It also marked the end of the festivities, leaving us at a loose end for the rest of the day. This is pretty much the way families like ours from the south celebrated Deepavali.

Teen patti revelry in north India at 11.30 pm

Outside of south India, particularly in the northern states, and through poetic license, that can be extended to include the east and western parts of India (in fact, anything that is not the south of the Vindhyas), Deepavali metamorphoses into Diwali. Diwali, to the best of my knowledge, involves no rigours whatsoever. Only revelries, and how! They can wake up whenever they want, do whatever they like, and all the action happens after sundown. While some superficial concession is made for religious observances, to show there’s no ill-feeling, the general idea is to have a good time. Good food, followed by teen patti, the Indian equivalent of the well-known gambling card game, Flush or Poker. Lest we forget, gambling has a religious throwback to that other monumental epic, the Mahabharata. A dice game, said to be an ancient form of Ludo, is referred to in the ancient texts variously as Pachisi, Chausar or Pasha. I looked that up, in case you’re wondering.

For spiritual uplift, the traditional Indian milk-based stimulant, bhang, is consumed in large quantities and pretty much everyone gets sloshed to the gills. It’s all a bit Bacchanalian, but a rollicking time is a given. Dinner is late and the feast royal, and almost certainly not vegetarian. The sweets are rich and massively calorific. The north Indians don’t believe in doing things by half. They spread themselves high, wide and plentiful, and throw themselves into the festivities with oodles of vigour. Rigour is strictly for their southern counterparts.

Days after the festive fireworks, our streets tend to resemble the blood-spattered detritus of a battlefield. The red wrappings of the crackers, mangled sparklers and blackened flower pots turn our roads into a red sea. Or even a black sea. To say nothing of the sulphuric fumes and pollutants that remain heavily laden in the atmosphere. Small wonder the Supreme Court put the kybosh on the use of firecrackers in the capital till November 1.

Let us also spare a thought for all the stray animals that roam our streets running helter-skelter for shelter as the bursting crackers literally drive our poor, dumb chums, crackers. Not to forget our terrified household pets – canine, feline and avian – whose hyper-sensitive auditory canals send them scooting under the beds for sanctuary or have them flapping about helplessly in their gilded cages. Then again, when do the powers-that-be ever empathise with what our beloved fauna are going through?

There you have it. Deepavali or Diwali, one festival in the same country, but celebrated in vastly different ways. The way I look at it, to each their own and there is no room for being judgemental. If a sense of unctuous religiosity is palpable amongst south Indians but missing in the north, the latter makes up for it by celebrating the festival in a markedly Rabelaisian and boisterous manner. Either way, it’s a public holiday and a splendid time is guaranteed for all. Just mind the fireworks.

To all our readers, I extend a very happy, bright, colourful and safe Deepavali. And Diwali.

     An Orwellian redux – 1984 meets 2024

A still from the movie Nineteen Eighty-Four

I am not sure if Big Brother is watching you, but by now there is hardly anyone left with a mobile phone who has not received a call from an unknown number to which, if you absent-mindedly respond, a seductive, recorded voice will coo these magic words, ‘This is a call from the Telephone Regulatory Authority of India,’ TRAI to its friends. If you commit the cardinal error of pressing 2 for further information from TRAI, the disembodied voice will connect you to a live person masquerading as a member of the long arm of the law, who will then go on to level charges at you for  making obscene calls to six different numbers in Mumbai and that your mobile phone will be disconnected within two hours if you do not follow the instructions that you will now be receiving. Why they grant you this grace period of two hours is, as Winston Churchill put it, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. In any case, unsurprisingly your number remains active even after two hours, which is a dead giveaway, presaging something distinctly fishy. Based in Bangalore as I am, why I should go to the trouble of making obscene calls to unknown numbers in Mumbai, when I could do precisely the same thing from my residence to unsuspecting denizens in Bangalore, is a point that does not impress the caller. Not that I would even remotely consider such an atrocity. Perish the thought. ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,’ you mutter to yourself, if you know your Hamlet.

Those who are naïve enough to ‘follow the instructions’ will then be advised that they are under ‘digital arrest’ and will be tracked 24 x 7 and commanded to await further instructions. You are also ordered not to leave your residence till further notice and be available on video call whenever needed. Which involves the added nuisance of your having to look respectable from your torso upwards for the camera, and not like something the cat had brought in. That rules out lolling about at home in your night wear, hair in comfortable disarray. One’s home is one’s castle, after all. Or so we thought.

As if all that were not enough, apart from being accused of making heavy breathing sounds to unknown women, you could also be charged with planning terror attacks, raping underage victims, transferring millions to numbered Swiss bank accounts, and illegally smuggling contraband goods into the country. Rare species of exotic reptiles are also included in this category. Not that you can do it legally, of course, but the list of ‘charges’ is as long as your arm, enough to be getting along with. They like to throw in a bit of variety when they call, these telephonic fake merchants. One of these days we will also be accused of ‘thoughtcrime,’ a possibility envisaged by George Orwell in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some smart phones alert you with a helpful ‘Suspected Spam’ or ‘Potential Fraud’ warning, enabling you to cut or block the line pronto, but these online geeks find ways of circumventing this obstacle, canny sons of Belial. If you ignore their calls altogether, they stay true to their assumed name and follow Robert the Bruce’s dictum to his troops (forgive the paraphrasing), ‘If at first you don’t succeed, TRAI, TRAI again.’

Once you have allowed yourself to be thus ensnared, a whole host of other headaches, and that is putting it mildly, will assail you. Incidentally, such a call can also come from a bank in which you hold an account or from a completely alien source of which you know next to nothing. The latest variant of this fakery is the caller from your fictitious courier service to inform you that an important document from FedEx is awaiting collection, details of which can be had if you press 3 or 9 whence you will be patched through to ‘our customer service representative.’ Why brand FedEx is the chosen one for this caper completely escapes me. Why not DHL or Blue Dart? Ours not to reason why, ours but to do and be hoist with our own petard. That is a matter for FedEx to unravel and for us to prick up our ears and sense the red flag when their name is mentioned. All I can say is pressing 3 or 9 is fraught with the same dangers associated with pressing 2. You have been warned.

 Welcome to the world of fake calls, now no longer something to be taken lightly but capable of inveigling you into a dark vortex of deep stress and anxiety. The crime these bozos are involved in is sinister and the wide-eyed victims are putty in their hands. You feel like a deer caught in the headlights. Furthermore, you will also have divested yourself of a great deal of money, before realisation dawns that you have been had – hook, line and sinker. As Bob Dylan said, you are ‘only a pawn in their game.’ Then you find yourself running to the nearest police station to register a formal complaint, after which you hare off to your family doctor to rid yourself of a severe case of migraine, dangerously elevated blood pressure and the onset of depression brought on by helplessness and hopelessness in attempting to deal with a situation only Kafka could have imagined.

Dear reader, you are well aware of this present-day scourge and should know enough to make absolutely certain that you DO NOT PRESS 2, or any other digit for that matter, when that idiot voice calmly asks you to do so. Even if you don’t take my word for it, the newspapers remind us almost every other day that this is a clear and present danger. What is it with so many of us that we flatly refuse to do anything our elders, or our better halves, tell us – mundane things like ‘have your bath before the water stops and switch the geyser off,’ ‘toast your bread slices before the electricity cuts off,’ ‘don’t forget to take your BP pills,’ or ‘make sure to release the car’s handbrake before driving off’  but are perfectly willing to follow to the ends of the earth instructions to ‘press 2’ from an unknown voice over our mobile phones? And I am not even getting into flights being delayed by calls threatening hoax bomb threats. The mind boggles.

What continues to puzzle me is why our guardians of the law, in their various avatars, have not yet been able to wrap their heads around this mobile telephonic curse. India now supposedly leads the way in the IT sphere and yet, we are not able to bring cyber-crime under control. I realise there are various hues of crime being committed in the cyber world, but when ordinary folk like you and me are daily wondering if we should respond to that number which we are unfamiliar with, in case we are unwittingly drawn into a conversation that leads to the rapid depletion of our bank balance, then it’s a bit thick. After all, that unknown number could also be from a long-lost friend or relative whose number you had not saved. We are in the heady realm of a Brechtian dilemma. While our lawmakers are still grappling with this problem, we can protect ourselves by just this simple expedient. At the cost of repeating myself, you can either take my advice and exercise extreme caution or go ahead and press 2,3 or 9 and the devil take the hindmost.

  New, improved YouTube spruces itself up

 I’m sure if Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be doing classic guitar solos on YouTube. Peter Capaldi.

Not all that long ago, watching YouTube was considered a harmless way of passing the time, if you had precious little else to do. Nothing of earth-shattering importance was ever seen on this free-to-air channel, but we could watch highlights of tennis or cricket matches played eons ago, interviews with actors and other celebrities, most of them no longer with us and sundry miscellaneous titbits of no great value. What is more anyone who thought he or she could sing or play an instrument would post their amateur efforts on YouTube for all their friends and relatives to post appreciative comments. Facebook and Instagram have taken over that dubious role now. The quality of the grainy film clips also left a great deal to be desired, but we surfed avidly to pass an idle hour. When it came to current affairs, we had few options but to suffer the daily cacophony dished out by the half-a-dozen or so mainstream news channels anchored and panelled by the same old faces, who went hammer and tongs at each other, representing rival political dispensations (with a distinct tilt towards the ruling faction), such that making sense of the proceedings was a non-starter.  It is significant that the same anchors and panel members continue to plague our small screens even today. Most of them are older but not wiser.

This is where many of us have discovered the new, bright and polished avatar of YouTube. A much-needed metamorphosis. Many of the former news anchors in the established news channels have deserted their posts and started their own vlogs on YouTube. They are not fettered by time constraints. Tact and diplomacy are not a sine qua non, as they express themselves freely without let or hindrance in a relaxed atmosphere. What is more, the transmission quality is, by and large, outstanding and the level of discourse of a high standard. You Tube has also become smarter. With increased viewership, they push for advertising revenue from corporate sponsors and conversely, offer ad-free incentives to viewers on a graded subscription model.

The result is that, irrespective of whether you wish to follow Fox News, CNN or ABC to get a balanced perspective of the relative merits or demerits of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, you can surf to your heart’s content and stay up to date. The same applies to the Indian political scenario. Any number of vloggers have opened up their own channels to entertain us multilingually to hold forth on the BJP’s chances in Maharashtra and Jharkhand assembly elections against the I.N.D.I. Alliance’s struggles to maintain unity amidst a disparate set of self-serving political persuasions. The discussions are conducted on a no-holds-barred but, by and large, civilised lines. Former celebrated news anchors like Karan Thapar, Barkha Dutt and newer stars like Smita Prakash and Sree Iyer have found a niche where they are the captains of all they survey and we are treated to informed and intelligent dialogues, yet free to make up our own minds on any given issue. In fact, Sree Iyer, sparkling vibhuti proudly smeared on his forehead announcing his Shaivite credentials, speaks to us every evening all the way from Washington, if the static White House backdrop is any indication! As the poet Wordsworth had it in a totally different context, ‘The world is too much with us.’ Any invitee to their shows is grist to their mills, be it Anand Ranganathan, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Abhijit Iyer Mitra, J. Sai Deepak, the warring Poonawalla brothers, Ramachandra Guha, the side-splitting ‘Scoop Raja,’ R. Rajagopalan (who will always commence his peroration with a shloka in Sanskrit), retired civil servants – the world is their oyster.

Also, choice of entertainment is unlimited. If music is your bag, watching high quality recorded concerts, pop or classical of the best and brightest from the western world, or from India’s stars in the classical or popular musical firmament, you are spoilt for choice. The same applies to sports, theatre and much else. However, one must not lose sight of the fact that YouTube also contains a great deal of rubbish including porn, tutorials on ‘how to make a bomb,’ and a great deal of sinister and undesirable propaganda. One can only trust to an individual’s discretion and parental guidance and supervision to ensure their children are not led astray by the free availability of hours of trash. Ah well, hope springs eternal. It is a strange conundrum, the nature of the beast. So much good and so much bad to be had, often in the name of free speech and freedom of expression – a subject the Americans are particularly partial to.

In the final analysis, one can only hope that the management of the YouTube channel, whoever pulls the strings, has seen the dangers of freedom to air going completely out of whack, and will take such steps as required to ensure that a modicum of control is exercised. One is not suggesting that Big Brother should be policing us round the clock, but a striving to achieve an optimal balance between good taste and a runaway freefall into a morass of filth, needs to be achieved. Good taste is subjective. I may think Big Boss is putrid while others may love it. Live and let live, I say. I do not come from a place of prudery, but in general, pudeur comes naturally to most Indians, though the startling sculptures in Khajuraho and Konark and the fact that India has given the world the Kama Sutra, may judge us all as hypocritical contrarians. What can I say? It is what it is.

As I sign off, it is time for me to switch on to YouTube and savour the culinary delights from the kitchens of Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver. Jamie’s Classic Spaghetti Carbonara anyone? And for dessert, Nigella’s Guinness Chocolate Cake would finish things off nicely. Happy viewing.

Published in Deccan Chronicle dt. 23/10/24.

Scientists uncover new facets of the Vermeer girl

Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer 1665

You’re just too good to be true / Can’t take my eyes off you. Frankie Valli.

Whenever a conversation amongst people with an artistic bent of mind turns to the great painters over time, invariably the names of Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, da Vinci, Dali, Picasso and a few others would tend to dominate the discussion. Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer may not be in the top-of-mind recall category. Mind you, I am talking about your average person on the street who does not possess much more than a working knowledge on the subject. Obviously, those closely involved in the art world would reel off Vermeer’s works in their sleep. I am not of their number. My bad. Which is why, when I recently came across a news item carrying the headline, ‘Secret of Girl with a Pearl Earring unlocked’ my interest was aroused.

Let me reiterate that my involvement in fine art is more in the nature of a cultivated taste, something that can keep me abreast of a conversation at a cocktail party at the launch of an art gallery. If someone came up to me, champagne flute in hand while puffing on a Montecristo cigar and asked me what I thought of Salvadore Dali’s forays into surrealism, I am likely to respond with something flippant like, ‘Dali’s surrealism was much touted but I am absolutely agog at his groundbreaking style in moustaches.’ At which point the art connoisseur almost chokes on his champagne, smartly feints and moves on to another victim. Not unlike Lionel Messi adroitly dodging past a phalanx of stubborn defenders. Mind you, the fact that I have just displayed an intimate knowledge of Dali’s penchant for heightened drama when it comes to moustaches should be reason enough for my erstwhile Dom Perignon guzzler to be duly impressed.

While I am still groping my way through the ethereal world of painters and their brush strokes, let me state upfront that music is more my line of country, a subject of deep and abiding interest. Painting just happened. Over the years, I have had the good fortune to travel to some of the great art centres of the world, particularly in Europe, where painters and sculptors over the centuries kept coming out of the woodwork. I began to gain some knowledge and a creeping ability to look at the great canvasses with an appreciative, if not critical, eye. At least, I made a brave attempt to appear critical, but long hours of staring at Van Gogh’s self-portraits in Amsterdam can make you go a bit cross-eyed. The great man had a penchant for painting himself, at times with his ears intact, at other times with one ear missing, the bandage telling its own gory story. Anyone who has seen the film The Night of the Generals might recall thespian Peter O’Toole, his blue, blue eyes irrevocably fixed on one such portrait of Van Gogh’s, going completely ga-ga until he had to be rescued by his fellow Nazi comrades. Truth to tell, it was only several years later, when my wife began to tutor me on the finer aspects of art and literature, that I started making a sincere effort to find meaning in abstraction, surrealism and impressionism. It is still a work in progress.

Let me revert to Vermeer. Any official handout on this great Dutch master would describe him as a painter who specialised in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life, which sounds rather prosaic and underwhelming. Akin to saying Bradman played cricket. This is more than amply reflected in his many canvasses (Vermeer’s that is, not Bradman’s) featuring women in their homes pouring milk into milk jugs, water into water pitchers, playing some musical instrument which I cannot readily identify, posing in a red hat and of course, our subject for this article’s discussion, a girl showing off her pearl earring. I should add that Vermeer has also distinguished himself painting outdoor scenes, but women performing their daily chores, with or without their jewellery, were his forte earning him worldwide fame. If not fortune.

I say that because art history is full of tragic stories of great painters who died in penury and their stock rose exponentially only after they had shuffled off their mortal coil and someone found their canvasses gathering dust under their beds. Some of Van Gogh’s greatest works are probably owned by some obscure Japanese millionaire in Kyoto, stashed away in an underground vault waiting for the price to go through the roof. In the case of Van Gogh, the roof can never be too high. Puts me in mind of Thomas Gray’s elegiac line, ‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air.’ Thankfully, Vermeer’s pearl earring girl is very much in our midst and has recently caught the attention of scientists and art scholars as their researches yielded a most fascinating discovery. Leastwise, they seem to think so.

Apparently, it is all to do with how our brain responds to stimulus, a well-trodden subject, but not in so far as our reaction to still life on canvas is concerned. The fastidious art critic might take issue with me in characterising paintings featuring human beings as ‘still life’ which, according to the purists, usually features a wooden bowl on a table filled with bananas, apples, pears and the like. Irises and other flora also qualify as still life. Notwithstanding, I take that liberty. As far as I am concerned, nothing can be more still than a framed oil painting hanging from a wall, however evocative.

 Getting back to the earring girl of Vermeer’s, The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, which houses this 17th century masterpiece, commissioned neuroscientists to measure brain output when viewing the portrait and other equally famous works of art. They discovered, to their astonishment, that the viewer is held captive by a neurological phenomenon called ‘Sustained Attention Loop’ which they swear blind is unique to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. S.A.L., to coin an acronym, is a state of being whereby the viewer’s eye is automatically drawn first to the girl’s own eye, then down to her mouth, then across to the pearl, then back to the eye – in a continuous loop. Hence the title. Evidently this makes you stare at the painting longer than others, according to the scientists. To quote one of the boffins who has been slaving away at Vermeer’s masterpiece, ‘You have to pay attention whether you want to or not. You have to love her whether you want to or not.’ While I can understand one’s rapid eye movement being controlled by the magnetism of the earring or the girl’s eyes, I did not quite get the love angle. Then again, who am I, a mere bystander, before a master of the palette?

Even without the benefit of these men of science analysing the girl’s earring and our eye movement, I have unfailingly experienced Mona Lisa’s eyes following me when I ogled her from whichever angle in the room I chose to stand and admire Leonardo da Vinci’s most celebrated gift to Paris and the world of art. No one told me there is some deep scientific phenomenon at work here. Truth to tell, I am not alone. Anybody looking at a painted portrait will tell you the eyes of the subject follow you right round the room, which can be a bit unnerving. It is a kind of optical illusion. Play of light, maybe. Who can unravel these mysteries? When it comes to Vermeer, I now know that it was a ‘Sustained Attention Loop’ that I was experiencing. For this enhanced understanding I must thank these neuroscientists who have studied Vermeer’s earring and the girl’s eyes till their eyes popped out. That particular experience cannot be had, by a logical extension, from the Mona Lisa or Whistler’s Mother, Van Gogh’s self-portraits or indeed, from any of Vermeer’s other girls on canvas. Their eyes can roam all they want as you veer from corner to corner of the exhibition hall. The neuroscientists have spoken. Girl with a Pearl Earring bags the Sustained Attention Loop Award. And I am not about to take issue.

Take a bow Johannes Vermeer, wherever you are.

One-song wonders

Mary Hopkin

I was lunching at a much-frequented club in Bangalore last week with a few old school friends, old being the operative word. Just to be clear, we were class mates in school about 60-plus years ago and this was one of those nostalgic, beery get-togethers we periodically indulged in. The WhatsApp message from our Group Administrator would invariably say something like, ‘Hi guys, how about next Saturday for a beer lunch at the club? Do come without fail. Who knows how many of us will still be around next time we meet!’ Such an enticing invite which none of us could possibly refuse, given that we are all well into our 70s. On schedule, we gather round our favourite table at the club waiting for the chilled mugs and khababs to arrive.

As if on cue, the sound system starts playing Those were the days by Mary Hopkin, a song that was a huge hit just around the time we were passing out of school. 60 years on, it is still a party favourite. Hopkin was herself an attractive, blonde teenager then. To think that she could be a grandmother now makes the mind boggle. Some stars are perennially meant to be teenagers. The thing that struck me about Mary Hopkin was that she was forever branded with just this one song. She released several more records, but no one remembers anything else by her, barring her immediate family and record company. In short, a one-song wonder. Yes, yes, I know she had another moderate hit, Goodbye, composed by Beatle Paul McCartney, but that song was more famous for the composer’s name. And he is now pushing 80! Goodness, Gracious Me, as the late Peter Sellers memorably put it while medically examining the ravishing Sophia Loren, now into her 90s.

Mary Hopkin set me thinking about other singers from the western pop world who became victims of one, huge hit and walked off into the sunset. Unsung and unheard of thereafter. Unlike The Beatles, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel and others whose list of memorable hits are as long as your arm.

Who remembers Peter Sarstedt? The name may not ring a bell to many, but Where do you go to, my lovely almost certainly will. As an aside, he was born in New Delhi in 1941. The song lives on even if Sarstedt is no more. If he released another hit, we are not in the know. There are some great lines in this song about a girl who consorted with the high and mighty in fancy destinations. Your name is heard in high places / You know the Aga Khan / He sent you a race horse for Christmas / And you keep it just for fun, for a laugh, ha-ha-ha.

Then there was Honey by Bobby Goldsboro, a teary, soppy sentimental, albeit melodious song that had the ladies reaching for their tissues. I should not be so cynical because the song was moving, the tune catchy and the lyrics heart-tugging. Apart from puppy dogs and Christmas Eves, the protagonist of the song is caught up in his bereavement. Now my life’s an empty stage / Where Honey lived and Honey played. Sniff, sniff. ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’ from Love Story came a couple of years later. The song always left me wondering if Honey was her name or if honey was just a typical American endearment to a loved one. Anyhow, that’s the last we heard of Bobby Goldsboro, at least here in India.

All these songs, and the ones to follow are of the 60s and 70s vintage. That is inevitable when one is looking back with rose-tinted glasses. Taylor Swift and Beyonce are ruled out, thank goodness! They will have to wait for another 60 years for today’s teenagers to wax eloquent and blub into their beer. Sometime circa 2080 sounds about right.

Flower power and the drug scene inspired some amazing songwriting during those magical days of our youth, none more evocative than Scott Mckenzie’s San Fransisco (Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair). I am sure he had many more songs to his credit but the song about ‘Frisco will remain in our hearts and minds forever. As will marijuana, Woodstock, free love, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg et al. – staple diet for most pop stars of that era.

Harry Nilsson’s Everybody’s Talkin’ (never hear a word they’re sayin’) which was featured on the soundtrack of the acclaimed 1969 film Midnight Cowboy, is still a favourite on the music circuit. As hobos Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, both skint and miserable, take their last ride together on a Greyhound bus, Harry Nilsson croons over the touching, final scene, I’m going where the sun keeps shinin’ / Through the pourin’ rain / Going where the weather suits my clothes. Wide-eyed hustler Jon Voight cradles a dying Hoffman as the bus heads out towards Miami. If I didn’t choke, it was a near thing and the song had much to do with it. Everybody was talking about Everybody’s Talkin’ but nobody is talking about Harry Nilsson.

How many of you can recall the name Mungo Jerry? I don’t see a single hand going up and I am not surprised. It was not the name of a person but that of a British band and their name was inspired by ‘Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer’ from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Which in turn inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber’s monumental musical, Cats, which is expected to fill theatre halls in London till the 25th century and beyond. Mungo Jerry released a song called In the Summertime around 1970, a bouncy, infectious reggae-inflected number that had half the world singing and dancing to it. They may have released more hits after that, but that remains a closely guarded secret.

In 1967 a band called Procol Harum gave us A Whiter Shade of Pale, a song which headily combined the finest qualities of baroque, soul and blues with a memorable instrumental backing that just stayed with you. Unsurprisingly, it went straight to the top of the charts when The Beatles and The Rolling Stones were shutting out all competition from the hit parade. The lyrics of A Whiter Shade of Pale was pure, abstract poetry. Except no one understood what it meant. Not even the composers themselves! Try these opening lines on for size, We skipped the light fandango / Turned some cartwheels across the floor / I was feeling kind of seasick / He said that her face at first just ghostly / Then turned a whiter shade of pale. But what the heck? The music was divine. Looks like Procol Harum felt they had nothing more to give after this. They were probably right.

South African singer Miriam Makeba may have had many hits to her credit in her country, but in the rest of the world, her 1967 sing-along, dance-along number Pata Pata became massively popular. Its driving beat and Makeba’s unique bi-lingual delivery had everyone instantly on the dance floor. Here in India, our very own Usha Uthup made Pata Pata a regular item on her varied repertoire. Word has it that the great Nelson Mandela introduced Usha to Makeba and they sang this song together on stage in Johannesburg! Once again, I am stumped if you ask me to name another song by Ms. Makeba.

I can go on this vein, but let me just provide a quick rundown, without much elaboration, of some of the other singers who made their fortune with a single hit but were largely anonymous for the rest of their careers.

Lee Hazlewood may be a relative unknown but his duet, Summer Wine, with Nancy Sinatra was on everybody’s lips during the late 60s. And still is. British singer Sandie Shaw had a clutch of hits during the 60s, but her Eurovision Song Contest winning entry, Puppet on a String is the one song she will forever be remembered for. Christie’s Yellow River, Lynn Anderson’s (I never promised you a) Rose Garden, The Archies’ Sugar Sugar, The Equals’ Baby Come Back, Zager and Evans’ futuristic In the year 2525 (Exordium & Terminus) – futuristic because the song was written in 1969 and ends with a doomsday prediction in the year 9595! I am sure you, dear reader, can add more examples. Provided little kids around the house call you Grandpa or Grandma. Daada, Daadi, Thaatha or Paati will also do nicely. Finally, those of you unfamiliar with the songs I have been rambling on about, you could do worse than visit YouTube or Spotify and go retro with a tall glass of whichever poison you fancy. And those moth-eaten bell-bottoms could come in handy to shake a leg.