Arnab Ray's Blog, page 3

83–The Review

The World Cup win in 1983 has been called the greatest moment for India since independence. I didn’t see independence, I may be old but not that old, but I saw 83. I can attest to how it was to live the experience of the World Cup victory of 1983, as a fan and as a young boy. I do not exaggerate when I say it transformed a generation’s very outlook on the world, on what we could do and what we could not. The word “magical” is over-used but let me use it for 83, for it truly was, and now decades since, I remember everything, every tremble of the heart, every tightening of the fist, every moment heard through the transistor or seen on a black and white TV, and I do not need to see the videos again or read the scorecards, it is all etched in my mind, like the first sensation of love, every little bit, and I may have forgotten many things hence, but never will I forget 83. For it was the age of believing and of Gods, and we saw them, on a cricket field, besting, not once but twice, the most fearsome team ever to walk out of a pavilion, and no one had given them any chance, and for good reason too, and yet they did it, in the same way no one in the 80s had given India, as a nation, much hope.

And yet here we are.

Which brings me back to 1983, being as it not just “a World Cup India won”, that would be 2011, but one that changed the course of history, in that it inspired, and I say this again without hyperbole, a generation.

Something as epic as 83 has always deserved a movie, and more, on it, because after all who reads books in this day and age? It needed someone to immortalize, through sights and sounds and music, what happened that summer in England, in the way Homer did for the Battle of Troy, so that even after the 80s generation passes, it will live on, through myth and fable, as epics do, Richards hitting that ball up in the air and Kapil running back, Yashpal Sharma throwing to the wrong end and getting Gatting run out, scenes straight out of a boy’s dream, except that these happened.

Once.

Kabir Khan’s 83 is not that movie. Kabir Khan chooses instead the “Ramgarh ki Sholay” approach, in that he decides to represent each member of that team with a duplicate, like unlicensed versions of real players in Brian Lara cricket , and have them redo the iconic cricket moments, as if people would care to see them being played out with duplicates, with the originals available on Youtube, pretty much exactly as they happened (not Dujon’s dismissal, Kabir Khan missed a detail there), and then, and here it is where things really go off the tracks, intersperse it with anecdotes from the World Cup, the exact same anecdotes the 83 alumni have telling over the years. Now of course this would have worked in a documentary, like Fire in Babylon or The Battered Bastards of Baseball, old clips and the real people talking about them, providing the moments context and leading us through what they felt, it would be fantastic and funny to hear Srikkanth talking about winking at the Queen. But in a movie when you dress up people as close as you can get to the physical likenesses of the players as you can get, which also works only for Kapil Dev, and not so much for the rest, and then have re-enact anecdotes, as in actually have the character playing Srikkanth winking at a sorry apology for the Queen, and not all of that is real either, like the mongoose bat or the repeated shots of glasses breaking from Kapil’s six, then all it is is an extended skit.

Nothing more.

And that is not all. If the “Ramgarh ki Sholay” thing he has got going is not bad enough, there is quite a bit of “Awwal Number” too. No, I am not talking about Ektaa and Aamir Khan playing the recorded message or Dev Anand singing “It’s Cricket” while being the son of Cindy Crawford, that would have been great, but 83 seems to rely on that old trope from 80s and 90s Hindi movies, where specific characters are shown to be having conversations, whose only purpose is to provide the narrative background, lazy film-making of “telling” rather than “showing”.

And that’s not the only thing back from the cold storage. There are cartoonish caricatures with exaggerated facial expressions, the British and the queen, and cardboard-cut dialog, of the kind that one stumbles upon in films only on late-night insomnia-driven channel surfing binges, when even Suryavangshi seems like “Citizen Kane”. There are also extended imaginary sequences of Pakistan stopping bombing Indian lines because of the World Cup, an example of myth-making which came in for criticism online, but I can tell inform outraged by this de-contextualized “Aman ki Asha” is that the guy who Kabir Khan got to play Imran Khan, who looked more like Charles Shobraj than the great all-rounder, was about as much an act of war as sending an empty missile into Pakistan, perhaps even worse.

Now, if like me, you lived through 1983, you might enjoy 83, because in your head you will replace the duplicates with the real men, your mind will fill in the missing drama and context, and the old videos will play in your mind, and the movie will be redundant then, and the emotion you feel will be from your memories, and not necessarily from what is playing on the screen. But for those who are not of those times, 83 signifies nothing. Unless you already feel for the characters, the movie helps in no way.

As an example of how it should be done, consider Dhoni. No masterpiece, it still has two great scenes—one where Sushant Singh Rajput as Dhoni goes out to bat in the World Cup final (wisely it does not show the innings itself), and the one where Dhoni sits on the platform, on the verge of losing his job as a ticket checker for chronic absenteeism, and as an empty train rolls past, he hears the future, the sound of the crowd calling out his name, and he decides, in a marvelous moment of cinema, to hop onto the train, a leap of faith into another future.

There is not one moment like this in 83. Not even one that comes close. If you welled up while watching it, it was your memory doing the trick, not Kabir Khan.

But maybe that is by intent. Maybe by 83, Kabir Khan was signaling his intent to make a movie as if it was 83 rather than on 83. Which is why Indira Gandhi plays a more prominent part than most of the players who actually took the field, and why there is a lot of Manoj Kumar in the depiction of the British, and why overall it has the look and the feel of the 80s, though definitely not in an endearingly innocent, nostalgic way.

The Gabba Test

Every generation has its greatest cricket match ever. 83 World Cup. 2001 Eden. Adelaide test, 2003. 2007 T20 World Cup. 2011 World Cup. And now Gabba and the 2021 Test series. Was Warne a better bowler than Lyon (he was, though Lyon has possibly the better record against India)? Can the current Australian side hold a candle, in terms of batting, to a team that had Hayden, Langer, Ponting, and some Waughs, and Gilchrist? Can anything be a better story than a bunch of no-hopers besting the mighty West Indies at the height of their glory?

Which Indian cricket achievement was truly the greatest? Between recency bias and the perfection of nostalgia, it is very difficult to be objective, and one can say one should not even try to be, for we are in the realm of emotion. The measure of the “greatest match ever” is what it means to us, how it resonates, and how much we shall remember years later.

So for me, while I can never put this above ’83 World Cup or 2001 Eden in terms of raw overpowering emotion, I also recognize that it is just me, being me, nothing in life can top your “first time” , be it in sports or be it in other things.

But in a way, it also takes a 90s teen to truly internalize the significance of a Test series win against Australia, because I am part of a generation that can never even imagine, even in our boyhood fantasies where running with Pamela Anderson on a beach in Santa Monica or interrogating Sharon Stone in the precinct seems attainable, that India would win a series against Australia in Australia.

It’s not as if that final frontier had not been crossed before. Virat Kohli did it last Australia tour, but that was a side that was bereft of its best two batsmen, Warner and Smith. This time, the Australians were the Australians we remember, full strength and full mouthed, and on pitches tailor-made for their brand of cricket.

That’s what gives it the context, and without that there is no drama.

A side that is shot out for 36 runs, and has its best batsman and captain leave right after that, and then periodically over the next three tests has most of its first eleven injured, still come back, win the second, heroically hold onto for a draw in the third with two men, unable to move, batting out time, and then come back roaring to take the fourth, is a script so outrageous, it would be rejected as too fantastical by the standards of the sappy sports movie. The victory here isn’t just scoring more runs or taking more wickets than the other guy, but in showing the strength and resilience to come back, again and again, hitting the mat, taking the count, putting the gloves in front, and come back jabbing and punching.

Cricket’s not just blood and tears and sweat, there is pure art too: Pujara wearing the bowlers down through attrition, Pant swivelling around, Shardul Thakur (or Tagore as a news anchor would call him) going Viv Richards, Vihari wincing and grinding through, and Gill, thumping the ball through the cover, pure minimalism in motion.

But greatness isn’t great, if there is no meaning, no significance in the larger scheme of things. This one, though, I believe does have that too.

For too long, India, when it has won, has won through individual brilliance. Remove the individual, also called the Sachin effect, and the wheels fall off.

This time, one could see the system, one that has been working for years now, bearing fruit, where the fate of the nation does not depend on the frailty of a Sachin-elbow or the jaw of a Kumble, or Laxman’s knee or Zaheer’s groin. Now, we have roles, and when one individual steps away, be it someone as important as a Kohli or a Bumrah, another can come in and fill that role.

Two things about the system need to be called out.

First Rahul Dravid.

Having him as the coach the U-19, has created a generation of cricketers that are mentally strong and technically able to deal with Test match batting. The role of an early stage mentor for talented young individuals cannot be over-emphasized. One only needs ask Vinod Kambli why.

And then the IPL.

While it is true that IPL has led to fundamental changes in the basic instincts of Indian batsmen with respect to initial foot movement and body balance, which is why against a class opposition on a very helpful wicket, they collapse in 36, it has also exposed young players to the best opposition in the world at a very early age. The Washington Sundar who strode into bat at the Gabba was a very different debutant from the Devang Gandhi who was flown in to face a rampaging Brett Lee. None of the debutants and near-debuntants in this series, and there were many, seemed even slightly overawed by the situation or by the opposition, and this is as much about what IPL has taught them, as it is about the existence of the IPL itself, with a “set for life” income guaranteed and a contract with a franchise. The Test match is no longer the financial life-and-death matter as it was to the generation of Sunil Joshi or Chetan Sharma, which in turn liberates their mind from fear, and let them, truly, to use the word of the great coach, “express themselves” without the fear that insolvency is only one bad shot-selection away.

But there is always the risk of reading too much into the significance of victory that is but a few hours old, at the time of writing. Maybe it was all chance, maybe it was just everything falling into place, maybe this is idle theorizing, and all it needs for everything to come tumbling down is a tour of New Zealand, but be as it may, nothing can take away what this victory means for every Indian fan, not for the win, but for how it was won, and whether it is for you the “greatest Test ever” or not, if you are an Indian, and if you were there, you will not forget this, not for as long as you live, an image seared into our collective memories, of a setting sun on a wearing pitch, and Rishabh Pant bringing it home, in a world more dangerous than it has ever been in our lifetimes, a reminder that even in the worst of times, good things happen, if we can just outlast the bad.

And finally, while cherishing this game for all time to come, let us be thankful, to sports, to cricket, to the Indian team, and of having been alive to see it all.

.

Cricket is Life

Sport as a metaphor for life may be a cliche, but that does not make it any the less true.

Much of our appreciation of sport is an expression of our tribal “thumos”, our spirited-ness (to use the translation from Greek for this Platonian concept). It is irrational, when thought of logically, why would I feel any joy when a private club, by its own accord, BCCI, wins a game, or when Kolkata Knight Riders, less wary of calling itself a club, does? Sure, a bunch of strangers who would walk past me if they saw me dying on the street get a big pay cheque and hold aloft a trophy and spray each other with champagne, but why do I feel emotionally invested in their fate? It makes no sense, and that is what thumos is, something beyond rational notions of self-interest—it’s why firefighters rush into burning buildings, or a bunch of men storm the Capitol building and post selfies, knowing fully well, what will happen to them.

But is it only thumos that drives our appreciation of competitive sport? Sure, it provides a dopamine rush when the game is won, but then how many of these won games do we remember, for life? Not many. That is where the cliche of “sport as a metaphor for life” comes in, what makes sport truly memorable, a little hypothesis that I have, is when we find ourselves reflected in it.This is not a conscious mental process, it is not as if we are deliberately trying to connect sport with our existential experience, it just happens.

When I was young, things moved me, in general, much more than do me, now, the ground was soft, and memories more easily made, even of small things, for how can I explain that thirty years later, I still remember the batting of Ali Shah and Greatbatch, before he became a slogger, and Jimmy the Padams. But what perhaps cut the most deep were the underdog stories, no make it the ones where the rules were broken, because that’s what being a teenager is, breaking the rules, be it Dave Houghton’s lone charge against New Zealand in the 87 World Cup, or India winning the World Cup in 83. Things that were just not supposed to happen, as the adults say that they will, and yet they do, a boy not much older than me sends Mushtaq and Qadir into the stands in a savage display of hitting unheard those days, and Kapil Dev avoids a follow-on through a barrage of sixes against Hemmings, and if you were told to be gentle and keep your head down, Prasad showed that sometimes it doesn’t work, that sometimes, you need to get into their grill.

And then I remember Calcutta 2001, as in my mid 20s, on the cusp of being emerging as a man of my own, I saw India, doing the same, a bunch of men my age, in the prime of their youth as I was, standing up to one of the mightiest cricket juggernauts ever assembled, and it was hope that I remember, crying at the end in a security lab where I saw the game on multiple monitors, and I will keep it in my heart, till my dying day, the hope.

The hope.

But I am not dead yet, just older, and more broken, like an old cambis ball, and wiser, so I move slower, and remember even slower. The high of winning still hits, thumos dies slow, but like an old addict, I am inured to its effects, and cynical too, about sportspeople, and one tournament fades away into another, forming a ceaseless haze of hyperbole, advertisements, and glitter.

Till Sydney, I find it again.

The cliche.

Once again. Two men, broken and bruised,one with a torn hamstring and the other with a spasming back, protecting another man with a broken finger, keeping out grenades flung from the front, and abuse from the back. There is no hope of winning, they cannot, none of the batsmen can move freely, and no one after them can either, and so they do what seems the easiest thing from the outside, but what isn’t.Surviving.It has taken me middle age, to understand how difficult surviving is, how difficult it is, when you are no longer as you used to be, physically and emotionally, and you know how fragile everything is, one edge, the ball staying low, and you are gone.

Sometimes you give in to the person you once were, as Vihari does, slapping over the slips a delivery to the boundary, and then apologetically smiling to his partner, but that is only a momentary failure, as you put your head down to bat out time, telling yourself to take it day-by-day, or ball-by-ball, and I will outlast this Cummins over for a Hazelwood, and then maybe hope for a bit of an off-color Stark, before Lyon comes back again.Winning, that is for another day, and scoring more than the other or keeping them down below your score is something I shall try to keep doing, but for now, the thing is to blot out the pain and the voice in the head that asks for a boisterous slash to the off, and if I can just go onto the next breath, I know I will be victorious.

I will be Sydney.

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Dear Comrades

[The following is a parody spoof. It is based on the following news item regarding Google employees forming a labor union, the first of its kind in high-tech.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/technology/google-employees-union.html)

Dear employees of Alphabet/Google,

It is good to know that Google is joining the brotherhood of the working class. Reading the news that Google workers are forming an union fills me with great joy, I knew something was afoot when Google went down a few weeks ago, exactly how things started in Khardah and Titagarh in the 60s.

I am not surprised though that the movement has started at Google. Google has been infused with revolutionary temper for a long time, with so much research into ML, which I believe, stands for Marxist Leninist.

But here are some suggestions for further improvement.

The use of Cost Per Mile or CPM as a term for advertisement pricing must be stopped. I am also hoping that Google stops all test automaton and instead provides work for union labor. Productivity tools must be destroyed as productivity is a capitalist construct. The frivolous naming convention of Android must be discontinued, only a capitalist would call an operating system Lollipop, successive versions should be called “sromeek”, “krishok”, “majdoor”. All negotiation protocols must go through the union politburo, we can’t have any decentralized protocols at all !

I have heard there is a lot class struggle in Google code, destructors should be called on all classes not implementing a go-slow method, and all structures should be re-factored as unions. I want a hammer and sickle painted on each container. Two union members must be assigned to every virtual machine and these will be known as virtual workers, as in they will draw salary but you will never see them at the machine because it is all virtual. Also gonoshokti should be kept on the walls of every Google cafeteria.

Once again, I am happy that Google is unionizing. We have brought great success before to jute industry in the Bengal Ganga valley, a once-flourishing industry belt, and I am confident we can repeat our success in Silicon Valley.

Here is hoping that the next time I go to the Google page, I see a “out to lunch” doodle and nothing else.

Only then will my dream come true.

Laal Selaam,

Jyoti Basu.

The Boutique Boudi

As a career NRI, I have always been in awe of the Boutique Boudi.

To the heretic, Boutique Boudi buys goods from India and sells them at a high markup in the US, but for those who have seen the light, they know that the real value she provides is the curation of the collection, be it jamdani sari or tribal earrings or ethnic bangles or the classical-yet-modern gold necklace that will catch the fancy of the traditional “born-in-India” mother as well as the US-citizen daughter, and as anyone who has done a PhD knows, you pay for advice. To be honest, your PhD advisor takes your future and your sanity as payment for the mentor ship, the Boutique Boudi, despite how much the sticker price may shock you, charges much less.

The Boutique Boudi isn’t just someone who makes an insane profit, no that would make her a Bezos or an Ambani, a cold worshipper of mammon . No the Boutique Boudi is friendly, and ever-smiling, and she knows, at least the successful ones, like Steve Jobs, that business isn’t a race to the bottom, but a rise to the top, that sustaining business operations lies not in undercutting prices( not that sometimes desperate times do not call for desperate measures) but in expanding the market.

For the Boutique Boudi sets the trend, defines the style, and when she sells, she sells to you, the person, knowing what it is you need even if you don’t know it yourself.

The personalization is the real secret. When she says “but I know you can buy this and this, all together for $2200, but I will make it $1999 because we are friends, and no please don’t tell me, you can’t afford this, your husband just went from senior manager to director, of course you can”, you realize the value proposition is not so much in the discount of $200, but the fact that if you walk away from the deal, then through the Boutique Boudi, the Bengali community of greater DC or the Bay Area or Los Angeles may suspect that your husband did not got a real promotion, just a title change within the same pay scale band.

The Best Boutique Boudis are resourceful. Once when British Airways gave 3 suitcases for economy, it used to be the carrier of choice for the Boutique Boudis to maintain their supply chain. Even though from time to time, BA might lose a suitcase or two, but that was fine, after all which business does not have loss of product during transport. Now that all carriers have become stingy with baggage allowance, the Boutique Boudi fly business to take advantage of the check-in limit, and this she can do, thanks to miles on credit cards. The flying premium is not just a way to efficiently move product, no, the Boutique Boudi knows, that social media updates from business or first radiate success, and success is like an open wireless network, everyone wants to tether to it.

Boutique Boudis use strategies for business development not taught in Harvard Business school. If the Boutique Boudi can get into the magazine committee, or even better, the events committee, her premier customers get into the inside track. What that means is that their article comes out in the first few pages of the pujo magazine, or their daughter dances in the front line of “Mayabono biharini” or their son does a solo recital from “Sishu Bholanath”. In that, the Boutique Boudi isn’t just selling a sari or a necklace, but a place at the table and an assurance of social prestige, and at 75 dollars a blouse piece, that’s a steal.

While coronavirus may have dealt a death blow to many an industry, the Boutique Boudi has adapted around it, zoom “show and tell” and WhatsApp price lists has replaced the table next to the prasad line at the pujo and print outs taken from office. And as we hope for normalcy to return around Durga pujo 2021, I am confident the Boutique Boudi will be waiting, with new merchandise, new narratives and that old, warm smile, putting a gentle price tag on the corporeal as well as the intangible.

The Gita: The Way I Understand It

A few weeks ago, I had read an article on the Bhagavad Gita, written by an eminent expert on Indian history. In it, she says, among many other things: (Link)

“In the Mahabharata’s plot, however, the Bhagavadgita rationalises mass slaughter”.

Now, I am not an eminent expert on anything, but with all due humility and acknowledging my own ignorance, while noting that I have some knowledge of the Mahabharata (I have written a book based on it), and done some study in philosophy, let me just say that, that even a perfunctory reading of the Mahabharata, the context in which the Gita is embedded in, would be enough to tell you that the Gita is not about rationalizing mass slaughter. Then there is the fact that the Kauravas are the evil usurpers in the world of the epic, who have committed multiple heinous crimes, and using the phrase “mass slaughter” for a righteous war to finish them, would be as ridiculous as saying “D-Day was the beginning of mass slaughter (of Nazis)”, but let us leave such trivialities to the side for now.

So why Arjun is dithering at the beginning of Kurukshetra? As the greatest warrior of his age, Arjun has killed, or to use the words of the wise, “slaughtered” many. He has done that, without question. However, now, faced with the prospect of the inevitability of the death of many of the people he loves, respects and cares for, he hesitates, because he feels “it is just not worth it.” Putting it in terms of today, he has done a cost-benefit analysis and the benefits, that of a mere kingdom, is not worth the cost of what it would take him to get it. Not the morality of war, he is not questioning that, Arjun isn’t turning pacifist, merely that this time the people at the business end of his arrows won’t be people he considers “enemies”, but “family”, and this triggers doubt in him.

A dramatic conflict in the greatest story ever told, but in terms of philosophy, this is an allegory for one of the fundamental questions of the rational human—is life worth it, given what we get out of living, pain and nothing much else?

When we are young, we move from one thing to another, without thought, one class, annual exams, and then the next class up, entrance exams, then relationships, then parenthood, and promotion up the corporate ladder, without question or pause. Our bodies heal well, time seems infinite, and life flows like a smooth chain, one link pulling the other.

And then, we reach middle age, which is where Arjun is, and things dry up. I am not going to go above middle management, more life is behind me than in front, people I love are passing away or will soon, the food I used to love now poisons me, I won’t be famous, I won’t change the world, other people walk away with my credit, people I know I am better than seem to achieve so much more. So why am I here? Why do I exist? And given that things are only going to get worse, why should I get up every day, go to work, write lines of code, sit in endless Web-exes? Is this daily grind worth what this takes out of me—my health, my peace of mind, my pride and my time?

The Gita’s answer, through the voice of Krishna, starts off by attacking this very model of calculating cost and of benefit.

First of all, benefit. Our physical body is a vessel of our immortal soul, or to use the words of a philosopher more understood, Yoda of Star Wars, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter” (pointing to Luke Skywalker’s body). The soul, or “who we are” passes from one vessel to another, in the way we shed old clothes and wear new ones, and what effect we have in the universe, or our significance in it, is not for us to understand. It is not for us, because we cannot, our senses cannot perceive the cause-and-effect of eternity, so vast and intricate it is, and because Arjun is the wisest of the wise, Krishna gives him a glimpse of Viswaroop, the order behind everything, or rather the source code of the master algorithm, but for us, mere mortals, there will not be such a code review.

So given that our model for analyzing benefit is so restricted in the data that is driving it, why would you take it so seriously?

Then, the cost. As Lord Krishna tells Arjun, that too cannot be estimated, because it is a function of not just your actions, but everyone else’s. The army arrayed in front of them, Lord Krishna says, is dead already, and Arjun is only an instrument of their demise, a part of the cosmic “Matrix” (to use another pop-culture reference), and so what he perceives as his “cost” is actually a pre-paid card, in which everyone else has a stake in.

One of the misunderstandings of Hindu philosophy, borne out of the Western tendency to trivialize and show “Oriental” philosophies as somewhat inferior intellectually to theirs, is that this edict of the Gita is a justification for fatalism—-that no matter what you do, things will happen as they will, articulated in the following way in the movie “Passage to India”, a movie based on a colonialist’s “understanding” of the country they ruled.

Professor Godbhole: Nothing you do will change the outcome.

Richard Fielding: So “Do nothing!” Is that your philosophy?

Professor Godbhole: My philosophy is you can do what you like… but the outcome will be the same.

No, this is not what the Gita says. If it did, Lord Krishna would ask Arjun to go home, because the Kauravas will, any ways, drop dead like flies, if not Arjun’s arrows, they will just watch Netflix’s India-specific content and die of shock. The philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita is exactly the opposite, it makes “karma” or “action” the fundamental unit of its teachings, if there is anything it is opposed to, it is “inaction”.

Which brings us to action. Or Karma. Karma is both the action as well as its consequence, they cannot be separated, if you do something, the impact of it is inevitable. The reason why the Kauravas are dead already is because of the consequences of their actions, or their Karma.

So, of all the multitude of actions open to us, which one should we choose? Here, the Gita, is different from contemporary philosophies and which is what gives the Gita its unique heterodox characteristic. Instead of prescribing a set of moral commandments, divinely ordained as the “right thing” and adherence to that hard-coded moral code as “the right path”, it gives you the right to parameterize your moral code—in a variable which it calls “dharma”. Dharma is what guides Karma, and it is tied into your purpose in the universe. Because there is no moral code prescribed, many interpret the Pandava’s tactics in the subsequent war as immoral, but there again, they do not understand the basic foundation of the Gita: it’s virtue is defined purely in adherence to the moral code, not the moral code itself.

So what does the Gita ask Arjun, and through him, the reader, to do? Instead of doing a cost-benefit analysis based on a model that is, by definition, imprecise, the Gita asks us to act, as per our chosen dharma. It tells us to never give up on our purpose, and we know what that is, be it writing code for a payroll processing system or selling toothpaste or unleashing hellfire on the Kaurava army. It does not ask us to not hope, or care, for reward, again a misconception of the teachings of the Gita, but realize that the “good” thing we seek is just not in our hands, that it is a resultant of cosmic forces beyond our comprehension, that the absence of observed good outcomes, that denial of promotion at work or the publisher’s rejection letter or the death of a loved one, should not be the reason for inaction or straying from the dharma-driven path of karma.

Because it is the journey, the sequential juxtaposition of actions-and-consequences, that is what defines us, not the destination, with the dharma being the code, as well as the adherence to it, and so bring forth the Gandeeva bow (or fire up your code development environment), and do that you know you should in the way that you know you should.

This, and only this, is in your hands. Nothing else.

Remembering 16 December

16 December is important in the “annals” of Hindi movie history, particularly in its depiction of cybersecurity and technology.

Directed by the legendary “Mani Shankar”, not to be confused with the more legendary “Mani Shankar Aiyar-gapped”, 16 December is a techno-thriller in the genre of “Waqt Humara Hai” (of Krypton bombs and fuse conductors), but with a focus on cybersecurity.Now cybersecurity would go on to become a staple of Hindi movies in a few years, be it Neil Nitin Mukesh in Players escalating his privilege on trusted assets with breathy moans of “Open the Web, Baibaah” or Bobby Deol cracking bank passwords (the password being “everything is planned”, the motto of the 2nd Planning Commission) in Ajnabee. However, 16 December was the among the first ones (along with Captain Vijaykanth using Windows Media Player to hack into secure systems) to seriously look at the interplay between a digital future and cyber-warfare. Or as its Wikipedia entry says “The team is equipped with hi-tech equipment such as mini spy cameras, computers, internet and other communication devices.”

For those who have not seen 16 December, and honestly I don’t know why not, a brief overview. Dost Khan, the dreaded Pakistani terrorist of the organization “Kala Khanjaar” has hatched an evil plan to decimate India. Arrayed against him are a team of Indian techno-military operatives, whose military chops are attested to by their use of militarese throughout like “Alpha one to Romeo three” and their technology expertise established by them being equipped with the internet, a military team led by Danny-playing-a-good-guy and Milind-Soman-with-his-clothes-on.

In the climax, Dost Khan is captured but he has kept a missile which will helpfully launch itself if it is not deactivated by a secret password. Milind Soman takes help of a precocious little boy with a laptop, the “Wolf Gupta” of his times for whom venture capitalists fight in the mohalla, a boy with rad hacking skills. He connects his laptop to the missile by what seems to be a VGA cable (nuclear missiles presumably come standard with VGA, because otherwise how can you share the screen in a conference room), and immediately the hacking is done. The code comes on-screen and it helpfully declares its provenance (the USSR), and then tells us that the code is implemented in FORTRAN and machine language. Note if this was an Indian missile, this would have been implemented in COBOL, so the attention to detail is commendable. But the FORTRAN declaration is a trap, because when you scroll down, the code is actually HTML. One would have expected Dost Khan to use C++ friend (Dost is friend after all) functions, but then that would have been too predictable.

The code to control a missile being in HTML is nefarious agreed, but the Russians don’t know how to hash their passwords (they are too busy doing exploits on Solarwinds to care for such trivialities), which is why the boy wonder immediately stumbles upon the secret code.

It is “dulhan ki bidaai ka waqt badalna hai”, not to be confused with the password in Dhadkan “dulhan ka toh dil deewana lagta hai”. Note the modern practice of using a pass-phrase as opposed to a password like “badman123” or the more obvious “dil garden garden ho gya” and if you thought the password can be typed in and the missile de-activated, then obviously you have been spoiled by watching James Bond movies.

In real life missile control situations, there needs to be multiple factors of authentication–not just “something you know” but also “something you are”. Wolf Gupta figures out that the password needs to be said in Dost Khan’s voice, perhaps (and this is my conjecture) because the HTML tag said .

So, with the clock ticking away, Danny uses mind games to make the baddy say the pass-words out loud, and one may wonder why would the guy, otherwise an evil genius, fall for this transparent ruse knowing fully well that they are trying to make him say the password, but no one really knows these things: why no one doesn’t just shoot James Bond in the head or why Pakistanis selected Imam ul Haque to open against India in the World Cup. Dost Khan says the words, and the Wolf Gupta boy pulls up audio editing software (after all all hacking distros have them), puts the words together and sends the audio back over the VGA connection to the missile, thus once again, spoiling the sinister plot of techno-terrorists.

December 16 comes every year, but they don’t make em like 16 December any more

Why I Watched The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives

Why did I watch “The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives” is a question I have been getting a lot recently, especially in light of my frequent pronouncements to conserve my few remaining moments for the better things in life.

Here is the thing.

While the content of the reality TV show may be vacuous and inane, the subtext of it definitely is not.

Of late, Bollywood or rather the power structure that exists in Bollywood has been challenged to open itself to people outside “the circle”, especially in the light of the death of Sushant Singh Rajput. While the high and mighty of Bollywood try to parrot what Hollywood is doing, in the same way that Roy-bans pretend to be Ray-Ban knockoffs, declaring their new found “social awareness” by coming down hard on existing institutions of the country for its medievality, it has been loathe to live upto the standards of progressiveness it preaches for others. Diversity for them has been restricted to whether to cast Chunkey Pandey’s daughter or Sanjay Kapoor’s daughter or Boney Kapoor’s daughter for the next “Student of the Year” franchise entry. And not one of the existing fiefdoms of privilege and power have “stepped back” consistently in any shape or form to give voice and opportunity to those historically under-represented in Bollywood—namely those not born a Chopra or a Khan or a Kapoor or a Roshan or a Kumar or a Bhatt or not married to them, despite myriad public pronouncements with the proper juxtaposition of woke words.

While one could perhaps give them the benefit of doubt in that it takes time to change a system that is this old, and that the intentions are in the right place, the “Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Lives” shows definitely that it is not. This is, for anyone even mildly clued into the sub-text, a gigantic middle finger from Karan Johar to those that want the circle of privilege to change in Bollywood.

In a season finale that reminds one of Godfather, Shahrukh and Gauri Khan, (ironically two individuals who were “outside” the industry but then went on to become its biggest insiders on the back of Shahrukh Khan’s undoubted prowess for ensuring box office returns), hold court, and tell the four “wives” of Bollywood, how they are all a family, how they will always be there for one another, no matter what happens. While it is difficult to get genuinely touched by something as botoxed as “The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives” because you have no idea what is real and what is scripted, the interaction, if we are to take it at face value, is poignant in a way, coming across as a genuine statement of how the high and mighty that represents Bollywood royalty are committed to “looking after another” in the way a family does.

Chunky Pandey may not have won a Filmfare and may never do but his daughter won on her first try, and that’s how it is, and Sanjay Kapoor may have bombed more times than the Allies at Dresden, but he still gets opportunities to redeem himself, and that is what privilege and connections give you.

Hope. You may have dropped off from movies for decades, but Ekta Kapoor instantly grants you an audience and an offer for a project is only a conversation away. This is what being in the circle gets you.

The message, at least to me, is clear as clear can be. We stand together, seems to be the statement, through good times and bad, and maintaining the privilege of the elite through to the next generation is our collective responsibility. While one supposes that social media posturing will remain for public consumption and for the woke Netflix series, the kernel of Bollywood power remains as strong as ever, committed to advancing the interests of families with the right surnames.

That to me is the reason why I watched it

On Maradona

I don’t really follow international club football, Manchester United or Liverpool or Barcelona or Bayern, I could care less for any of them. Come World Cup though, I regain my love for football, and then when the final whistle blows, so does my ardour, back into cold storage for another four years.

The reason is simple. Without knowing it, I am still looking for the 86 World Cup, and of course Maradona.

Maradona ruined football for me. He was my first football hero, and the problem is, I could never find anyone who could follow him. For my other childhood sports heroes, there was a line of succession–Kapil led to Azhar led to Sachin led to Sehwag led to Kohli, but in the case of football, the first one just destroyed the rest. People will say Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo are greater or as great, and since my prism has always been the World Cup, I have never really understood what’s so great about either of them, they don’t find any space in my memories of the game, not even the slices that Zico, Platini, Milla, Baggio, Rincon, Valderama, Ronaldo Nazario, Bergkamp, and many others have. Maybe the fault is mine, I also don’t understand the greatness of Lily Singh and Dhruv Rathee.

It was once said about Rabindranath Tagore that his sun shone so brightly that it blotted out all the other stars, and that, to an extent, he destroyed Bengali literature thoroughly, because no one could be expected to match up to him. Maradona did something similar to me in terms of football, nothing I ever saw could be that exhilarating, the speed, the dribble, the balance, the precision, the lunge, and yes, the hand. Maradona was drama in motion, elemental emotion both on and off the field, the only difference being that while on field he would trip over a challenge but still keep his balance and ball control, in real life, he mostly lost possession. But here is what you separate the man and the legend–the man may be no longer with us, but legends, by their very nature are immortal.

Most people will remember his goal against Belgium, or his goal against England, with hand and then foot, but for me the real moments of brilliance were when he didn’t score himself, but passed, precision passes cutting through lines of defenders to a Burruchaga or a Caniggia, a body feint that send the man-markers one way as he passes the other, this was pure magic without the props. Who won, who lost? Who cares?Football, I have always felt, is the most elemental of all games, which perhaps explains why it is by far the most popular sport in the world.

There is something about a goal, people and circumstances preventing you from attaining the goal, and you, in control, guiding the ball into the goal, or not being able to, that is so obviously a metaphor for life that it does not need explaining. And that’s why there was something transcendental about watching Maradona cut through defenses with dribbling. Here is what we aspire to be, out in flesh and bone, a metaphor for all metaphors, and that is perhaps why his excellence affected us, or at least me, in a way no other footballer ever did after that, that what makes the legend is not the goal, but how he dazzles while attempting to get there.

There will never be another Maradona. There might be other great players but never Maradona. No one, in all these years, has been able to measure up. And I don’t think anyone ever will.

Soumitra On Our Minds

I have never met Soumitra Chatterjee. I did see him once, at the Kolkata Lit Meet, when I sat in the audience and he was, well yards away, on the stage. I had gone to the event for one reason and one reason only. Him. I wanted to say, in a silent way, “thank you” to this stranger, the flesh and blood embodiment of so many characters that I had grown to love, and aspired to be, from Apu to Amal to Pheluda, and I am glad I did, despite the dissonance of it all, of a silent word to a stranger who I seem to know better than some people I really knew, not him really, not quite him, but his projections on a screen in shadow and light, brought to life by the real person, Soumitra Chatterjee, best in his craft as one could be.

Soumitra Chatterjee played a set of characters that, to me and to generations that came before and after me, captured, in a way by no other, the essence of what has come to define the Bengali man. With Apu, he captured the imagination and sensitiveness of the poet-Bengali, a tumult of emotions, careening in the head-winds of fate and yet somehow maintaining his compass throughout. With Amal, he is the homme-fatale, always out of reach, as Charulata observes him through the binoculars, a creature not really of this world, but of the imagination. In Saat Paake Bandha, he is the unyielding, unbending Professor Sukhendu Datta, stiff and drunk with the idea of his own nobility, who would let his marriage break to a woman he loves, rather than change the person he is. As Amulya in Samapti, he is the archetype of the Bengali mother’s pet. In Kapurush, he is the coward. In Teen Bhubaner Paare and Basanta Bilap, he is the smart-taking, chanygra chele, with an edge and a twist-dance-step. As Asim in Aranyer Din Ratri, he is the uber-cool, hyperconfident, arrogant cad who when confronted with a woman better than him, gets intimidated and runs. As Phelu-da, he is the Bengali action-hero, quick with the gun and with the wit, and heartbreakingly handsome while he is at it. And as the harried Mastermoshai in Atanka, he is the every-man, caught in the vice-grip of the terror that was CPM rule in the 80s.

These are not just characters in movies. They were all personal. We all aspired to be this super-human agglomeration of personalities that represented the sum-total of Soumitra on screen. In our imagination we would be winning the hearts of Nandinis and Miss Calcutta 1976s with our charm and wit, and foiling nefarious schemes of Hajar Hajar Hajras, and writing a masterpiece, which we then, like Apu, would destroy with our own hands, because the greatest Bengali man is one who could have been great but chose not to, and then, on hot lazy afternoons, float away into a world, where with Kishore Kumar as our voice, we would sing “Ami Chini Go Chini Tomare”, becoming a character that represents no less than Rabindranath Thakur, with Satyajit Ray behind the camera, becoming, within ourselves—Rabindranath, Satyajit and Soumitra, the holy Trinity of Bengali intellectualism. Of course, we never came close. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t try, or convince ourselves that we had succeeded.

There will be of course no more characters played by Soumitra Chatterjee. The tragedy of our lives is mortality, that there always will be an ending-line. But when you are an artist, of the kind that Soumitra was, the end gives a strange poignancy to what we have of his work, because it makes what we have even more precious now, because though the gentleman I saw in Kolkata Lit Meet is no more, his characters will live, not just in old film stock, but in the collective conscience of all of us who grew up with Soumitra on our minds.

Good night, Mr. Chatterjee. Good night, Pheluda. Good night, Apu. Good night, perfection.