Iqbal Khandey

This morning I read the news about demise of Iqbal Khandey. That news with tinge sadness also brought back nostalgia of the days, which would be very hard for anyone to fathom in this age. I must have become acquainted with Iqbal around 1974 through an extended clan of Ganais of Mattan. I remained focused on friendship part of the familiarity rather than to understand complex relatedness of Ganais. Iqbal at that time was studying in Amar Singh College while I was in the Government Degree College Anantnag. He would frequently visit our college mainly to meet our common friend Gulzar Ganai, who as I understood was also closely related to him. One occasion that has stuck in my memory for the reasons that perhaps underscore the essence of those times was that we, Iqbal, Gulzar and I, were standing outside the main gate of the college in 1974 and wanted to go to the town in a horse driven ‘tonga’ as none of us was ready to undertake that journey of about two kilometers on foot. But there was a cache: the ‘tonga’ ride would cost 25 p per person but we three persons combined did not have 75 p on us. That was nothing out of ordinary; not having any money was a rule not an exception in those halcyon days. Somehow I salvaged us from the predicament when I spotted an acquaintance who borrowed me a weathered one rupee note and we merrily took a ‘tonga’ ride to the town.

In 1975 we both graduated from our colleges and joined the university. Iqbal went to the English department and I after certain detours ended up in Chemistry. We never interacted in the university and Iqbal didn’t stay there for a very long and left his masters course to pursue IAS, which he cleared after 1975. I always had perceived him as an academic not a bureaucrat, but then academia in those days, that too in Kashmir, was a kind of last resort for failed careers. I did later meet Iqbal on a few occasions subsequently. On the eve of the 1983 elections Kashmir, I together with Gulzar went to see Iqbal in his office. He was, at that time, the Deputy Commissioner Anantnag. He was in some meeting and it was a while when came out and the first thing he uttered was that the official machinery has been directed to intercede on behalf of and in favor the National Conference in polls, which the latter went on win with a thumping majority. Last time I met Iqbal was in 1992. Owing to my sabbatical trip to Germany and dislocation, the university had held back my salary for almost a year. Iqbal was by then a secretary of some important government department. I went to see him at his official residence in Jammu and he then walked with me to the residence of Ajit Kumar who at that time was secretary education department. It was during that short walk I realized the folly of having approached Iqbal for a personal matter. Not that there was any change in his demeanor; he was as usual courteous and affable. It was my personal aversion to everything bureaucratic.

On a day in 1974, Iqbal together with a few Ganais came to my place and he picked up ‘Summer of 1942’ book from my shelf to borrow and to never return. That was the point when I resolved to never ever lend a book come what may. And thanks to Iqbal, I can boast of a personal library of over a thousand books made several times over in different places in different countries. 

Iqbal was always fun with a nasal accent that belied steely resolve; he was deeply erudite with eclectic knowledge; despite everything, he was a romantic at heart.

Emergency-an historical perspective

I have been reading Coomi Kapoor's book on emergency published in 2015 and it has proved to be more revealing than I had bargained for, but not in the manner I had expected. That period remains strongly etched in my memories, and I always have considered that act of Indira Gandhi as completely unconstitutional and constituted an unnecessary subversion of the entire system. Nevertheless, Coomi Kapoor's book has forced me to rethink the entire issue through an historical perspective. In the aftermath of the declaration of the emergency and the excesses carried out under its name, the true causality  had become and remains obscure until this day. 

What no one talks and that book, between the lines, reveals is that crescendo of opposition agitation prior to the emergency and its organization was under the complete control of RSS. Coomi Kapoor herself had been associated with RSS in many manners. The book has a foreword written by Arun Jaitely, who only sometimes back wrote one of the most shallow accounts of that era. 

More importantly, most of the leading lights of opposition were guided by RSS. Indira Gandhi might have had a purpose in declaring that emergency but its operations were taken over by thuggish Sanjay Gandhi and his coterie of Punjabi mafia. And the outcome was a horrible period in the Indian history. Curiously, many of the leading persons from that mafia later became part of BJP.

Validation of Einstein at universal scale

In the span of last one month, three separate reports validated different aspects of Einstein's theories on universal scale. One study, published in Science on June 22, showed bending of light as predicted in General Relativity at a galactic scale using two distant galaxies. Another study, published in Nature on July 5, validated the equivalence principle of universal free-fall, from General Relativity, using a three star system, two dwarfs and a pulsar, about 4.2 light-years away. And finally a study, published in Nature Physics on July 16, and based on two-year data analysis of atmospheric neutrinos from the IceCube Neutrino Observatory failed to find a violation of Lorenz symmetry. Lorenz symmetry forms the basis of Special Theory of Relativity.

That actual vindication of Einstein might come from another report indicating that quantum field theory might after all not be explaining the entire reality and discovery of phenomenon expounding the transformation of quantum fuzziness to 'realism' might be close. Einstein never was comfortable with quantum uncertainty.

Votaire

Secularism embodies separation of the state and church and mutual non-interference. The concept developed in reaction to the excesses of the Catholic Church in middle ages. One of the main proponents of secularism was the enlightenment philosopher, Voltaire who spent last decade of his life crusading against the church. When Voltaire died in Paris on May 30, 1778, he was refused a Christian burial. It was after the revolution that triumphant French National Assembly in 1791 forced Louis XVI to recall his remains to the Pantheon. The dead ashes were escorted through Paris by a procession of 100,000 men and women and the funeral car had the words: "He gave the human a great impetus; he prepared us for freedom." Voltaire did not give democracy and he rather gave a cry to challenge the ideas that were forced down on people. But it was the Church against whom he reserved his ultimate wrath.

Quantum Weirdness

Quantum world is weird and that's an understatement. One of the theories explaining that weird world, called Copenhagen interpretation, shuns realism. Niels Bohr was the main proponent of that interpretation that made Einstein uncomfortable and spats between the two on the subject are legendary. As it turned it is clear until now that Einstein was incorrect. Another explanation for quantum mechanics was proposed by Hugh Everett in his PhD thesis, called Many-Worlds interpretation and was based on concept that myriad possibilities inherent in a quantum system each manifest in their own universe. That interpretation, summarily rejected by Niels Bohr, later made  comeback but not soon enough for Everett, who gave up the field and went on to work for Pentagon for the rest of his life.

Ironically, Einstein's discovery of photoelectric effect saved scientific world from ultraviolet catastrophe and laid foundation of quantum field. But it was Niels Bohr and others' interpretation that turned Einstein against the uncertainty of quantum mechanics and until the very end he never reconciled with it. In between he unsuccessfully tried to poke many holes into quantum interpretation, with one of the most famous being EPR thought experiment. EPR stands for Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. Einstein remained convinced that quantum uncertainty indicates incomplete understanding of reality. Nevertheless, the field thrived with contributions from likes of Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac and later John Wheeler, Richard Feynman, John Stewart. It has been long since that experiments have proven quantum entanglement, what Einstein used to call 'spooky action at distance' and is explained without violating the speed of light paradigm.

It maybe pointed out we live in a quantum world, without fully knowing how it works. 

Lowest of low creeds

Every time something ludicrously horrible comes of Modi's mouth, people start feigning exasperation. The reality is that notwithstanding his high office and belief of his fanatics, the lowest of low creeds is what defines him and has been the hallmark of his infamous career in politics. 

Right at the time when he stormed into power in Delhi riding on mostly a fact-free campaign, William Dalrymple had written a longish article on Modi in the New Statesman tracing his roughshod ride through ranks of the Hindu fascist organization to become chief minister of Gujarat. According to Dalrymple, Vinod Mehta, the late editor of Outlook, described Modi as a bad news; Modi before before he assumed chief ministership in Gujarat used to visit Mehta with alleged incriminating material against his predecessor from his own party. It was his demeanor that alarmed Vinod Mehta. 

It didn't take long for the entire world to see that demeanor when Modi most unscrupulously went on air to seek revenge for the Godhra train burning incidence and used his office and position to fan pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat in following days and weeks. His low creed was at full display when he taunted hapless displaced victims of those riots unleashed by his henchmen with his total abetment. Years following the Gujarat riots of 2002 were marked by fake encounters, elimination of uncomfortable allies, false charges against opponents that were orchestrated by his most trusted accomplice, Amit Shah, who for all practical purposes became second most powerful person in the country. Amit Shah was Ratko Mladić to Radovan Karadžić. 

Throughout his election  campaign of 2014, Modi embarked on spilling outright lies to total mauling of history. His appeal was to the baser instincts of intolerance to bring to the forth the worst of the worsts with so-called Gujarat model nothing more than a charade to cover his real motive. The office of the prime minister far from making Modi a statesman has instead steeply diminished in purpose and reputation. His prime ministership marked a new beginning in India that country could have done without; it emboldened and reinforced the his fascist supporters to indulge into gruesome and grotesque acts of violence against Muslims in particular.

Throughout and predictably, his low creed remained in plain sight through his steadied silence, no matter how gruesome the act. Be it the bludgeoning of a human on the mere suspicion of beef consumption or hacking and burning of another human on the basis of so called love-jihad, the low creed of Modi became even lower. Only time, he like a chameleon feigns hurt is when news of gruesome India gets picked up in international media. That does not stop him from following some of the worst elements on Twitter. 

The worst from him came when in one of the most egregious and most likely illegal act he visited a collective punishment on the entire country through abrogation of 86 percent of the national currency in circulation. The overnight havoc hit the most vulnerable in the population that Steve Forbes called inhumane and Manmohan Singh termed as organized loot. Any other leader if forced to take such decision would be somber and explain to the people reasons. Again his low creed got better of him and he made fun of the suffering Indians while on an official trip to Japan.

One would think that people have seen the rock bottom of lowliness, only to see him crashing though another bottom to remind his deep seeped low creed. That moment came in just finished election in Gujarat, the state he ruled as the chief minister for more than a decade. The mere hint that he might lose one election sent him into downright gutter and he once again went freelancing fact free and outrightly dangerous lies.

The most bizarre moment came when Modi, the prime minister of India, insinuated that Manmohan, his sanguine predecessor had entered into a conspiracy with Pakistan to alter the outcome of the election in Gujarat. Basis of that downright stupid insinuation was a dinner party hosted by Mani Shankar for visiting former Pakistani foreign minister, Khurshid Kasuri. That diabolical bloviate from Modi was countered by a sharp rebuke from usually reticent Manmohan Singh and has been repudiated by the host himself and two of the invitees, Rahul Singh and M. K. Bhadrakumar, with latter calling the discussions at the dinner party as airy-nothings. That was a dinner party were likes of Modi never get invited but we can be assured of him falling through another rock bottom. 

If that was what a mere hint of loss in Gujarat did to the mental stability of Modi, we only need to imagine where a perceived loss at national level could send him. When election results from Gujarat come, there is already a big time loser, Narendra Modi.

-Rajiv Kumar

The existential crisis

India has entered a phase of an existential crisis; it's on a quintessential path to fascism. If the impending disaster comes to fruition, no demographic group will escape its trepidation. Specious protests and online campaigns will be insufficient to combat their concerted campaign in progress. They already are in the possession of highest echelons of power in the country and they will bring in the final shove once they get an overwhelming control of both houses of the parliament. When Indira Gandhi declared internal emergency, the press and judiciary acted as bulwark against authoritarianism of the time. And now India is straddling an abyss where fascism emanates from media and judiciary mostly endorses it; dissenters routinely get murdered.

But then the country signed itself to a virtual doom, the day Modi was elected prime minister with an unbridled majority. The harsh and bitter reality rather has been that the country elected him concisely for the reason of being an unapologetic bigot. Nevertheless, the manner and causes of his election have been rendered moot and futile; the culture of intolerance and rabidity under his watch has defied the worst fears that anyone had ever harbored before he became the prime minister. The political murders under his watch bring India close to nadir of its morality but then anyone who expected anything different would have been living in a fool's paradise. 

The real news reserved for the ardent supporters remains that once the forces of evil unleashed under the Modi regime are done with their hatred of imaginary enemies, they will turn on to the middle class, the very people who in their devotion for a strong leader put him in power. Fascism, once entrenched in a country will run its full course with many indiscriminate victims. It might be Muslims, progressives and intellectual, who are for now in the cross hair of those treachrous forces but with their increased power will come their need for invention of new enemies to keep their apparatus of destruction running. The fact that Modi is edging close to being exposed for the hollowness of his policies be it in the spheres of econmics or external affairs, makes those evil forces unleashed by him even more dangerous than they are already. Their think tanks are already running mock trials of bringing the consitution to its knees and pull down the entire democratic edifice.

They might very well attain their that ultimate aims on the backs of their passionate supporters who will be their ultimate fodders for running their devil's workshop. But then the people who let him get away with one of the most hideous schemes of so called demonetization deserve no better.     

The Nobel Shame

Aung San Suu Kyi has not only proven to be a gargantuan disappointment but she also reflects that flawed and capricious fetish of turning less than mortals into heroes and then romanticizing their tales. A cursory look at her background would reveal that her father was the founder of Burmese national army and was murdered by the rivals in the force. Aung San after her long stays in India and west returned to Burma and started leading a democratic movement against military junta. Nowhere her resume manifests her as a humanitarian and that misguided Nobel Peace Prize was only in recognition for her struggle against military dictatorship. But her zealous lead in persecution of hapless Rohingya Muslims more than ever merits a recall of the prize given in the name of peace. No one has made more mockery of that coveted prize than her and if the Committee fails to move perhaps other winners of the Peace prize can raise their concern at belittling of their honors by the doings of Aung San Suu Kyi.

India at 70

Just as  India embarks on celebrations to mark 70 years of freedom, a stark and sobering reality reared its head in the form of deaths of over sixty sick children in a state run hospital in the largest state in the union. Those children were from poor of poorest families who couldn't afford expensive treatments in private hospitals. As per the news reports, even in the state run hospital the poor parents had to buy medicines and bandages on their own. With their meagre means those parents did everything asked, only to see their children die in their very helpless presence. The reason, oxygen ran out. Probably those living in opulency will find it hard to fathom and will go around their business on the backs of underaged vulnerable helps, whose families occasionally are condigned to die for the lack of oxygen. And that Modi wouldn't lose his breath while thumping and shouting hoax from the Red Fort built by Mughals. But at this juncture being crepuscular works in his favor, otherwise he would be horrified to see the impending doom of his making.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has become one of the most reviewed books since and even before its publication in June 2017. The anticipatory mêlée had a sort of cultish tinge akin to that witnessed in the last decade of the last century before release of Harry Potter books or later in this century when Steve Jobs had his gadgets visit the humanity to change the trajectory of the homo sapiens in the manner of cognitive, agricultural and industrial revolutions. Every single human trajectory has been uniquely uneven leaving unfilled interstitial spaces for those unable to keep the pace for eclectic reasons to fall through only to be forgotten by rest of the humanity. They might be forgotten but the unforgotten also called underprivileged hardly stop living; as a matter of fact they in their own way live their exhilarating lives by creating the ministry of utmost happiness where living and non-living; person and nonpersons share whatever there is to share and critical to their survival support one another stoically unknown in the ‘real’ world.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is an amalgamation of tales with arching labyrinths of contemporary tumultuous events where heroes are the people whose existence in society is acknowledged only when utterly essential. Protagonist of one of the main stories in the book is a transgender, born as Aftab who later rechristens herself as Anjum, weaves her existence in a house aptly called Khwabgah, the house of dreams but not before his/her mother having exhausted her supplications at the mausoleum of Hazrat Sarmad Shaheed. Historically, Sarmad, an Armenian Jewish mystic described by Audrey Truschke in her book on Aurangzeb as an irreverent who had prophesized that Dara Shukoh would take throne; Aurangzeb had him executed in 1661. Slowly and tortuously, Aftab realizes his non-status and starts looking for signs for the life that would have meaning for him; although, it might be said, it was not due to dearth of love for him.
 

The house of dream with history dating back to Mughals turns out to be a quintessential place not only inhabited by queer and transgender but any perceptional misfit finds there a shelter.  But Anjum’s life takes a turn after she survives the visit to Gujarat during the pogroms against Muslims unleashed under and provoked by the state administration with, as in Roy’s words,

• “the then chief minister of Gujarat appeared on TV in a saffron Kurta with a slash of vermilion on his forehead, and with cold, dead eyes ordered the burnt bodies of Hindu pilgrims be brought to Ahmedabad, the capital of the state, where they were put on display for the general public to pay their respect”.
• 
  

Anjum survives only for being a transgender as the killers, on a Muslim killing spree, did not want to court a bad luck by killing a transgender. As Arundhati Roy tells

• “nothing scared those murderers more than prospect of a bad luck. After all, it was to ward off bad luck that fingers that gripped the slashing swords and flashing daggers were studded with lucky stones embedded in thick gold rings. It was to ward off the bad luck that the wrists wielding iron rods that bludgeoned people to death were festooned with red puja threads lovingly tied by adoring mothers. Having taken all these precautions, what would be the point of willfully courting bad luck?”

Anjum fresh from the trauma leaves Khwabgah and makes a home with dead in a cemetery that eventually becomes shelter for the intentionally and deliberately forgotten. That is where her new companion, originally a low-caste boy, Dayachand, who later calls himself Saddam Hussein, tells Anjum the story of orchestrated cow-based lynching of his father. That reflects foreboding of the lynching season to descend on India with cow as a pretext to target the most vulnerable Muslims. In time, the dwelling in the cemetery, called Jannat (Heaven) Guest House becomes a converging point ultimately joined by another protagonist in the book, the indomitable Tillotama. It is through Tillotama, Tillo in short, that Arundhati brings the Indian devilry through inhumane occupation of Kashmir to the fore. Tillo’s story brings to the world, not that there was left anything unknown, the treachery of Indian occupation of Kashmir and the heinousness that state resorts in suppression of the aspirations of freedom. It brings in graphical details the mechanical and bureaucratic apparatus that the state had built to maintain an aura of Indian control over state, it only lacked the wherewithal to create an Orwellian state to affect hearts and minds of Kashmiris. That shortcoming was not for the lack of trying.  The brutal killing of Jalil Andrabi, a human rights lawyer and firing at the funeral procession of Maulvi Farooq, though fictionalized are truthful representation of true events. More than any of those events, the book conveys an unambiguous defiance of Kashmiris in the face of tortures and deaths; graveyards as a matter of fact became symbols of resistance and resilience.

The panorama created by Arundhati Roy traverses across a vast canvas brings in an irrepressible hues of characters caricaturing almost everyone in Indian politics be it lisping Vajpayee, trapped rabbit Manmohan Singh or Kejriwal with unsingular look or that manipulated anti-corruption crusader, the Farex baby faced Anna Hazare. But the book lightens up the most where the story focuses on the unacknowledged people fallen through the cracks, who are essential for opulent lives as long as they remain invisible. It’s the description of things they do to lighten the oppressiveness of their lives like graphic sacrifice of a water buffalo for Eid that makes the book what it is and Arundhati Roy who she is; through her prose one can peek into her soul. The irony is that it might be that those people are as vulnerable as their opulent counterparts given the political turn of events. The then chief minister of Gujarat, with cold dead eyes, is now presiding the entire country with unparalleled power and with quirk of events coupled with personal greed of unscrupulous politicians, his party is also saddled in power in Kashmir. Not that any of this matters, Kashmiris have long resolved to not be swayed by politicians of any color in Delhi or their local facilitators in the valley for their ultimate goal to breath free air of the pristine valley free of gun-wielding agents and schemers and to not allow them to traduce anymore than they have already.

At the end one would wish Tillo and her three companions instead of going to a school for architects had been studying law or international relations given the trails their individual and shared lives traverse in the book. For Anjum, her accomplices and collaborators I wouldn’t change a thing.