Mappings

Dal Lake stories

Jyoti Malhotra — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:26:00 GMT

I wish the Dal Lake fills up with sh..t, says Aijaz. This beauty that you see all around, this is what has attracted India to Kashmir, I wish it all shrivels up and becomes so completely ugly that everyone leaves from here.

Aijaz is a Kashmiri journalist and he’s just been given the second-degree by various security forces who have clamped a tight curfew in the valley since Sunday, from both the state JK police as well as the CRPF paramilitary. He admits he’s shaken up, by the cross-questioning he’s been subject to by a cool commanding officer in Ray Ban glasses, and possibly much more by the fact that he found himself in the middle of a predicament that stories are usually made up of.

The thought that he could have become a story too, a tiny paragraph in an agency report on the never-ending crisis in Kashmir that people would read in the morning after newspaper alongside their cup of tea, and then throw it away, saying, Oh, its always been like this in Kashmir…the thought crossed his mind and frightened him, admits Aijaz.

Aijaz’s only crime has been that he didn’t have an updated curfew pass when curfew was suddenly declared at an unearthly 4 am on Sunday, so when he got out of home to get one and then go to work, the CRPF man at the picket refused to honour the old pass, acknowledge the press accreditation card of the media organisation he worked for, or even listen to his pleas. He was simply told to get into the back of a Gypsy jeep, and shut up.

Luckily, the CRPF’s press relations officer took Aijaz’s mobile call and told him he would try and help. In the half hour or so that elapsed before he found himself before the effortlessly cool commanding officer, Aijaz felt he’d been halfway through hell and back.

First there was the elderly havildar or police constable, so thin and weakly that if you blew hard at him he would have fallen down -- we call people like these “ex-gratia,” because they’re nearing retirement, Aijaz said – who summoned Aijaz, asked him why he’d called the CRPF media officer for help and in the same breath taunted the J-K police officer standing nearby.

“All you Kashmiris who’ve been shouting ‘lashkar aayi, lashkar aayi, where is your Lashkar now?” demanded the constable of the cowering policeman, referring to the Lashkare-e-Toiba, the terrorist organisation that has been at the root of several bomb blasts and attacks in India.

That’s when Aijaz was put into the Gypsy and driven around. Soon they reach the spot where the commanding officer is sitting. The cross-questioning over, the officer tells Aijaz : Get out of here and don’t turn back to see me, not even once.

By now Aijaz is a bundle of nerves. As he walks down the alley, taking care not to look behind, he calls his mother on his mobile phone and asks her, “What are the prayers that you recite when you’re in trouble?”

Stories like these are a dime a dozen in Kashmir. Perhaps Aijaz would never have disappeared, his talisman of a press card preventing him from getting into real trouble.

But what of the fear that is an integral part of growing up in Kashmir? Truth is, Kashmir’s journalists have lived with such intimate knowledge of violence and compromise on both sides of the fence – from the state and from terrorists – that they live in perpetual terror of not being able to fearlessly see their own faces in the mirror the next morning.

Call it the agony of self-respect or the unbearable lightness of journalism. When power flows from the barrel of an assault rifle, it doesn’t breed fear in the victim, it breeds contempt.

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`Tu man shudi, man tu shudi...'

Jyoti Malhotra — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 13:11:00 GMT

The past is so intimately connected with the present in Kashmir, most people prefer the cocoon of the time warp, when you let the chinar grow under your feet and watched the sun set on the Dal Lake (or as Salman Rushdie, in his `Haroon and the Sea of Stories,' so famously panned it and called it the Dull Lake). Those were the days when Jawaharlal Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah were best friends, and remained, despite the Sheikh's incarceration in a mainland jail for 17 years.

A Kashmir Times reporter in Srinagar, watching the barricaded historic Lal Chowk on Monday, tin sheet by tin sheet, concertina coil by coil, couldn't contain the nostalgia. It was right here, at the Lal Chowk, he wrote, that Nehru and the Sheikh had met in 1947, to "put the political stamp on the constitutional accession of the state to India."

That's when the Sheikh recited a Persian couplet for the occasion : Tu man shudi, man tu shudi...' You become me, and I become you.

So what does the Sheikh's political inheritance mean for Kashmiris today? Fact is, in the entire time of the recent pro-independence marches and protests, mainstream political leaders have shunned the Valley for the bright lights of Delhi. Omar Abdullah made his two-minute speech to fame in Parliament at the time of the nuke deal in early July and since has been seen much more often in the capital's TV studios than in Srinagar. Mehbooba Mufti, whose PDP government was part of secretly brokering the Amarnath shrine agreement along with the Ghulam Nabi Azad government -- the agreement which has sparked off the latest round of violence in Kashmir -- speaks loudest when she is full of fire and vitriolic against the BJP...

Question is, why arent any of the above in Kashmir at a time like this?

No wonder, today's Kashmiris shun the Sheikh's pro-India politics and prefer to keep faith in leaders like the independence-minded Mirwaiz and pro-Pakistani gentlemen like Syed Ali Shah Geelani. The Sheikh's Persian couplet has changed ownership.

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Anything for the Delhi press, says Kashmir

Jyoti Malhotra — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 03:11:00 GMT

When security forces want to swat a fly, they use a machine gun to kill it. In Srinagar, a tight clampdown from Sunday has meant that all internet lines are down in hotels and all cyber cafes are closed. But the impossible was breached at the airport, where several airline managers, both government and private, got together to help this reporter in distress. One young man took me to his office, whipped out the internet line from his own computer, another found a pen drive, but when none of the above worked, a third sent the story through his own dedicated line. Service to humanity? A new Gandhian approach to solving the Kashmir problem?

None of the above. Kashmiris have realised for many years -- as have others, both underdog and topdog -- that if they have to get their story out to the rest of the world, then the only way out is the outside press. Western newspapers have capitalised on this special feeling, Arundhati Roy's piece in the London 'Guardian' that Kashmiris should be allowed to secede is the talk of town, and that most national dailies (read, from Delhi) are far more interested in the nuke deal than in their own agony.

I am the happy victim of this special treatment everywhere I go. At the Idgah grounds on Friday, as thousands of young men milled around threatening to crush a visibly non-Kashmiri reporter walking around without a headscarf/dupatta, others linked hands to prevent the crush from closing in. On the streets, CRPF men had been clearly told, "by the bosses above," that the media should especially not be spared. (Three Kashmiri journalists got thrashed in the bargain). But when the CRPF men stop my car -- actually a friend's car, because the taxis have gone off the road, too -- and ask, rudely, Where (the hell) are you going, and hear a non-Kashmiri voice replying (mine), they immediately pipe down.

I cant end this blog without writing about this young, 20-something, truly fresh-faced young army officer called Pranav Prasoon, who offered to give me a lift in his jeep at Jamu airport when the rest of the city had been shut down by the Amarnath Sangharsh Samiti, backed by the BJP-RSS. Pranav's courtesy won my heart when I thanked him profusely for his offer.

"Anthing for Delhi," he said, smiling his freshly minted smile.

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Adrenalin and azaadi at the Eidgah

Jyoti Malhotra — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:15:00 GMT

Dial a rumour, and you’ve been connected to Kashmir. Conspiracy theories are especially welcome. Since most people don’t trust the “other side”, and there are several in the matter, elastic conversations are a common outcome. Oddly enough, the same rumour has usually been heard by more than a few people, igniting the funny feeling that it may even be true.

Such as the failure of the Hurriyat leadership to say even one thing of substance at the Eidgah grounds on Friday afternoon. It was the biggest collection of young and old men and women Srinagar had seen in decades, some said even rivaling the gathering that commemorated the death of Sheikh Abdullah in 1982. The Hurriyat had called for a complete shut down and they got it. Thousands of people came all the way from several districts, from as far away as Doda and Kupwara, to pay homage to the memory of Hurriyat leader Sheikh Abdul Aziz killed in police firing a fortnight ago.

The city was rocked with slogans, back and forth and back again, all through the morning hours, demanding azaadi (freedom). Water and soft drink kiosks had been set up every few hundred yards to bolster the flagging marchers. Stop here for adrenalin, they could have said, and it wouldn’t have mattered. There was only one game in town on Friday and it was being played out at the Idgah grounds.

So why did the Hurriyat blow it? Why did it seem like an act of sabotage at the Eidgah, a wilful cutting off your nose to spite your own face? Why did Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Kashmir’s pro-Pakistan leader leave the ground in his government-protected white Ambassador car, minutes after Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, a co-leader of the Hurriyat, started speaking? Why didn’t the Mirwaiz finish his speech?

Here’s a look at the possibilities being bandied about on the streets of Srinagar :

The public address system at the rally collapsed.
Geelani, who wasn’t well the night before, felt faint because of the crowds
The Mirwaiz and some other Hurriyat leaders present on the makeshift dais had received death threats from Pakistan and wanted to leave on some pretext or other.
The Mirwaiz and some other Hurriyat leaders who stood on the makeshift dais were so exposed to the large gathering that their security began to get nervous that they might meet the same fate as Abdul Ghani Lone who was assassinated in the nearby Martyrs graveyard six years ago.

In a city which thrives on conspiracy theories, it seems perfectly possible that all of the above are perfectly true.

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A pas de deux in Srinagar : The Ragra !

Jyoti Malhotra — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:45:00 GMT

Srinagar has discovered a new two-step and its called The Ragra. That’s in Urdu/Hindi and it can be translated to mean, The Crushing.

This is how it goes : A group of boys gather around in a circle, each linking one arm over the shoulder that is next to them. Once they’re in a tight knit, they put their right foot forward and bend the leg so as to stamp the ground, hard. The other leg is dangling a little in the air, and you can use it land back on the ground, for momentary relief. But it’s the intensity with which you stamp the right leg – all the boys are actually stamping the right leg in unison – and shouting, “Ragra, ragra, Hindustan!” Let us crush Hindustan.

The preferred Ragra has the Indian tricolour drawn on the ground with orange, white and green chalk. Its supposed to give the leg added lift and the chant, substantial vim and vigour. But its not a precondition, really, to the main event.

The two-step was invented in June at the height of the agitation over the Amarnath shrine board and its since caught on like wildfire. At the Friday protest rally in Srinagar, it was the young men with black or green bandanas on their heads which said “Bismillah” in Urdu or “Allah-ho-Akbar’ (God is great) that were the most convincing, but Kashmiri women could count as among the quickest learners, thank you.

A few score were on the streets too on Friday, their heads covered with the ubiquitous dupatta, but nary a hijab. These feisty women can wield a ‘belan’ and do the Ragra with equal enthusiasm. They don’t need to be draped in shuttlecock (so named because of the mesh in front of the face for the eyes) black to prove anything.

Often the Ragra has a sequel : Jeevay, jeevay Pakistan ! Long live Pakistan !

Clearly, Srinagar is no place for faint-hearted patriots.

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(Sub)Mission Kashmir? No, its azaadi...

Jyoti Malhotra — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:18:00 GMT

Hum kya chahte hain?Azaadi !

What do we want? Freedom!

That cry, sounding more and more like what Lokmanya Tilak must have sounded like when he announced, “Freedom is my birthright, and I shall have it,” resounds across Srinagar, long after the enormous rally at the Idgah grounds on Friday afternoon has ended.

Difference is, Tilak was taunting the foreign invader, while the Kashmiri is provoking Delhi. If you were in Srinagar these days, and watched the massive protest unfold and then retreat, after the Hurriyat leadership inexplicably vanished from the Idgah after speaking a few words, you’d figure there wasn’t much difference at all.

But first, a word about the phenomenal discipline and the goose-bump impact that public prayers can evoke. The ‘namaaz’ is read out over the public address system around 2 pm, and already, thousands of young men have lined up Mecca-wards, crossing their hands in front, unsheathing their feet and bending their heads downwards. Then after a few moments they kneel down and touch the ground in obeisance, so that when they rise there’s a shadow of dust on the long bridge of their noses and their foreheads.

You could hear a pin drop at the Idgah maidan, the air is pulsating with the fervent devotion of the faithful. The young men don’t wipe off the dust on their brow and their noses.

Within seconds, as minor speakers take over the mike and begin to rouse the crowd with their freedom slogans, the crowd responds as if its connected with a rubber band to the speaker’s microphone.

Nara-e-taqdeer/Allah-ho-Akbar!

Aavaaz do/Hum ek hain!

Kashmir is giving notice to National Security Advisor MK Narayanan that they will not be bullied by the fact of his visit on Wednesday. The city has been shut down in answer to the people’s call for curfew – there is nothing official about it – but nothing is open. No milk booths or cigarette shops. By the evening, a few carts trundle into the city, selling luscious, brightly yellow water-melons, those that couldn’t make it to Jammu or Delhi.

But the seething isn’t dissipated yet. Till late into the evening, the slogans for “azaadi” rent the air, float over the tree-tops and settle on the asphalt. By dusk, the city is a ghost town again.

Srinagar has successfully stuck its tongue out at Delhi.

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Doomsday on August 18 : the Zia-Musharraf story

Jyoti Malhotra — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:02:00 GMT

For all India's snootiness about its democratic credentials -- a free press, an elected parliament, and of course its five thousand year old civilisation -- Pakistan's press this morning, the morning after Musharraf's exit, is full of the stinging slingshot any country would be proud to wear in its armour.

Ayesha Tammy Haq in 'The News' pulls few punches when she declares that Musharraf''s defence of doing everything he did, for the love of his country..."a country he battered, destroyed and dumped..." smacks of cheap patriotism.

Check out Anjum Niaz, also in 'The News' : Look hard at the persona that once was indestructible. Look hard at the system that once fuelled his engines and provided all the horse power. You'll always find the same lessons when you study the rise and fall of powerful men. The pattern never changes; the script is never different; the end is never benign. And yet, men in power blithely continue believing they are destined to rule forever.

And then there's the redoubtable Hamid Mir, a familiar face on Pakistan's first private TV channel, Geo News (owned by the Jang group, which also owns English-language The News daily), who gives the secret deal away on Kashmir between Musharraf and Manmohan Singh, complete with details of when they met (in New York and in Delhi), what they talked about (Musharraf's 4-point proposal on Kashmir, along with Singh's modifications on obliterating the Line of Control on the ground, thereby paving the way for Kashmiris on both sides to meet easily) and who was commandeered to take over the back channel (Satinder Lambah from India and Tariq Aziz from Pakistan) to resolve the dispute.

Unlike in India, where you often dont want to call a spade a spade because it might hurt someone, there are never any secrets in Pakistan. India's Brahmanical tradition inherently contradicts the irreverence for hierarchy and establishment that is the soul of a free press. Pakistan, perhaps, has learnt the hard way, having been under army rule for 36 years out of 61 years of its independence. Pakistani journalists, at a South Asia Free Media Association conference in Islamabad in May spoke about the time when, under Zia ul-Haq's martial law, they used to be whipped for writing and speaking out against the regime. Never again, they vowed openly.

That is why there was such horror and consternation in Pakistan when India's national security advisor M K Narayanan spoke of the "big vacuum" in Pakistan, on the eve of Musharraf's exit. Why would the world's largest democracy shed tears for a dictator who underwrote the ISI for years, both in Afghanistan and Kashmir, even if Pakistan's political coalition hardly put up a united front?

Pakistan's fledgling democrats, often at severe odds with each other, have learnt their August 18 lesson really well. Exactly 20 years ago, on August 18, 1988, General Zia was killed in an air crash, along with the serving US ambassador to Pakistan Arnold Raphel, setting off various conspiracy theories. Zia's death brought the civilians back to power, both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif in various cycles, but both were prohibited, by the all-powerful Pakistan army, from imposing political control over itself or its intelligence wing, the ISI. The year after, the ISI launched its low-cost insurgency in Kashmir, and it was rewarded with the old disaffection against Delhi.

General Musharraf's fate on August 18, 2008, was pre-determined not because it was was written in the stars, but because its civilians spoke truth to power.

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Where were you when Musharraf signed out?

Jyoti Malhotra — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:35:00 GMT

Where were you when the lights went out on Pervez Musharraf? (It’s the kind of question that begs several clichés : end of an era, crossroads of history, change of guard, etc)

If you were in the Foreign Office establishment, you would get several answers. External Affairs minister Pranab Mukherjee was on his way back from Jangipur, his constituency in West Bengal. Foreign Secretary Shivshanker Menon, along with the PM’s special envoy Shyam Saran were putting together a presentation on India’s impeccable nuclear record that they hope will persuade the 45-member Nuclear Suppliers Group, at its plenary session in Berlin on August 21, to allow India special entry into the exclusive club of nuclear weapon powers. (Since India is not even a member of the NSG, such a presentation to the plenary is more than unusual.) The joint secretary in charge of Pakistan was on an extended Independence Day weekend.

No wonder Foreign Office spokesman Navtej Sarna refused comment on one of the most anticipated days in South Asia’s history. Considering the Foreign Office has over the last few days angrily spat at Pakistan for commenting on the separatist uprising in Kashmir, it must have thought better than to publicly remark on Pakistan’s own political transition.

South Block was so still on Monday afternoon, it seemed it had gone to sleep in the somnolent humidity of a robust monsoon. But perhaps that was also part of a complicated media game-plan.

By Pakistan standards, the Musharraf baton handover has been pretty smooth. General Ashfaq Kiyani’s all-powerful army stayed neutral, although it seemed as if a deal had been struck with the revenging Nawaz Sharif. Certainly, the army didn’t want a former chief to be impeached, for that would have given the impression it had lost control of Pakistan. Even if Kiyani believes he heads a “professional” army and unlike Musharraf, doesn’t have personal ambitions, he is hardly going to go too far from General Zia ul-Haq’s maxim of “most countries have armies, in Pakistan, the army has a country.”

So, in exchange for an honourable exit, protection for himself and his family and a quiet life in a farmhouse outside Islamabad in a village called Chak Shehzad, it is said, Musharraf agreed to go. His threat to invoke the infamous Article 58 2(B) in the Pakistani constitution which allows the President to dissolve an elected Parliament, remained just that.

The histrionics of October 12,1999, when Nawaz Sharif had moved against Musharraf as he was flying back from a trip to Colombo and Musharraf responded with a counter-coup, were a sliver of memory from the much-maligned past. In this version of a sacking, the former commando started his 75-minute speech with considerable bravado at 12.45 pm IST, reeling off his achievements in the manner of a municipal commissioner (hundreds of kms of roads had been built, hundreds of watts of electricity had been produced, so many new dams had been commissioned, even a new national gallery in Islamabad had been opened… ending his speech with how much he loved Pakistan, mujhe Pakistan se ishq hai, he said). But as he droned on and on, he began to visibly wilt. Even after he’d said “khuda hafiz” and saluted his Army twice, he didn’t seem to know how to let go. Perhaps a sense of doomsday was setting in as he realized that this was it. Time’s up. Day’s done. The page had turned. History hadn’t even spared Musharraf.

The Americans, it seems, had also agreed Musharraf was yesterday's news when Pakistan PM Yousuf Raza Gilani went to Washington a couple of weeks ago. Only, and perhaps for old time’s sake, Bush had asked Gilani to “make it humane” when his party finally wielded the knife. The end, it was said, was brokered by a former British high commissioner to Islamabad, Mark Lyall Grant -- perhaps one part of the American yin-yang whole -- who was posted in Islamabad a couple of years ago.

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A full circle in the Caucasus

Jyoti Malhotra — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:14:00 GMT

With Russia asserting its sphere of influence in South Ossetia, the crisis in the Caucasus is chalking up a full circle.

Months after the break-up of the Soviet Union in end-1991, a group of Indian and Western journalists based in Moscow (yours truly, included) were piling into a Russian Ilyushin-76 plane and flying off to Vladikavkaz, as far south in Russia as you can get, a hop, skip and plane jump to Tskhinvali, the capital of South Ossetia.

It was as much of a conducted trip as it can get, but if you valued your life it was best to do what the Russian army ordered. So we rode down the bombed out streets of Tskhinvali – once again on the frontline between Russia and Georgia this weekend – and noticed how a statue to Joseph Vissarionovich was still standing on Ulitsa Stalina. Clearly, the Ossetians were intent on paying homage to the Soviet Union’s self-proclaimed man of steel, for helping carve up the Caucasus in the 30s and giving “autonomous” status to regions like South Ossetia – all this inspite of Moscow’s attempts to bury Stalin’s ghost.

Then there were the bombs in the middle of the night that hardly let you sleep. The ride back to Vladikavkaz, the snow-covered mountains keeping pace with the military chopper, wingtip- to-wingtip, remains memorable. As we passed a bottle of vodka around the small plane, friendships began with alien Westerners that continued into sturdy Moscow evenings and the pilots – while they flew the plane and kept it within touching distance of those mountain peaks -- spoke poetically about the commingling of literature and empire that has been a subject of much Russian desire, from Lermontov to Pushkin and Tolstoy.

If life is all about the dreams that you die for, then its clear that Russia, immeasurably fortified and strengthened by its vast reserves of oil and natural gas, will never give up its influence over the Caucasus. The Chechnya tragedy in the mid-90s was presided over by Boris Yeltsin, any self-respecting Russian will argue, the man who colluded with the West to break-up the Soviet Union.

Okay, so Georgia and Ukraine, today, have the right to ask to join NATO, while Kosovo must be allowed to become an independent nation. Must NATO ask friendly states like Czechia and Poland to keep missiles at Russia’s doorstep, clearly aimed at Russia itself?

If the West’s bear-hug of Russia looks like its turning out to be a step in post-Cold War containment, why shouldn’t a vastly strengthened Moscow not flash its petro-arms at presumptive NATO babies like Georgia?

Truth is, after its disastrous intervention in Iraq, the US has simply lost the will to mount another offensive or fight someone else’s war. That’s why Georgia, which has the third largest contingent of foreign troops in Iraq, asked that some be brought home to fight the Russians. They were – in US planes.

Meanwhile, the Indian foreign office has no views at all on Russia, Georgia or the Ossetians. Considering Delhi is right now shooting itself in the foot and mouth over the crisis in Kashmir – Muslims in the Valley want to walk across the Line of Control and join Kashmiris on the other side in Pakistan, while Jammu’s largely Hindu population is blocking the movement of supplies into the Valley – Delhi is frantic about discussing the politics of breakaway territories.

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Alchemist Bindra and the pleasure principle

Jyoti Malhotra — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:07:00 GMT

The Arch-shot, the Alchemist, Arjuna's Inheritor and, according to CNN, Boom-Boom Bindra are only some names that the young night has spawned, in honour of the 24-hour glory that Abhinav Bindra has brought home from Beijing. In the Mahabharata, Drona taught young Arjuna to focus on the eye of the toy bird on the tree, to the exclusion of everything else. Abhinav is a worthy disciple of that genre. But as the Hindustan Times reported on Tuesday, the reason Bindra's superhuman win at the 10m rifle event stood apart from most of India's "chalta hai" attitude, was because it was painstakingly created, day by day, over the last 11 years.

Alongside the physical training, in the last week of July, here is what Abhinav volunteered to go through as part of a five-day confidence-building course in Germany to put his mind in top condition : Climbing an 8 m high wall, crossing a Burma bridge, overcoming hurdles like pizza platforms (?), a high-bar balance, spider web jumps, and a U-swing bridge.

No wonder excited Indian journalists wondered why young Bindra smiled softly and didnt pull of his shirt/ dissolve into whoops of pop patriotic delight/unleash a few Punjabi swear words, that some other Indian athletes, especially from the Punjab, are often prone to do (check out the collapse of Indian cricketers in Sri Lanka and their mealy-mouthed reactions, also in Tuesday's Hindustan Times), after the Indian national anthem in Beijing had set off a billion goose-bumps back home in the mother country.

Bindra's staggering mind-training summons up the Lance Armstrong example. The American cyclist overcame testicular cancer that had reached his lungs and his brain to win the Tour De France -- not once, but seven times -- easily considered the most arduous and spectacular bicycle road race in the world, across 23 days and more than 3500 kms in the French countryside.

On August 9, two days before Bindra's win in Beijing, Armstrong came second in the 100-mile Leadville race in Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains, USA, a challenging mountain bike course that often takes you over 10,000 feet.

Armstrong was always said to have a genetic headstart in one sense, in that his muscles produced half the amount of acid that other people did when they were fatigued, allowing his to recover faster than most other cyclists. Then there was his dedicated physical training, that increased his muscle efficiency, converting fast-twitch muscle fibres that are good for sprinting, into slow-twitch muscle fibers, said to be good for endurance sports.

According to his physiologists, Armstrong trained for both "higher maximum capacity" -- which increases the upper level of performance, just like a sprinter does -- as well as "greater submaximal capacity," that is to expend less energy for sustained performance, just like a marathoner might.

But what accounted for his seven Tour de France victories? After the last, Armstrong put it out himself : Its normal to feel pain when you push yourself to do what your body isnt accustomed to doing, but when you begin to feel pleasure in the pain, then you know you've won.

For so many lotus-eating Indians, Bindra and Armstrong just showed us the light beyond the mortal divide.

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How many medals did Sonia Gandhi get in Beijing?

Jyoti Malhotra — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 05:58:00 GMT

Today, at least, belongs to Abhinav Bindra. The President and the PM have already congratulated him for bringing in India's first individual gold. BJP president Rajnath Singh was on the line on Aaj Tak saying "hello, hello," wanting to get a couple of words in, but the channel was already disconnecting, breaking into the montage which heralds the end of the news on the hour. Sonia Gandhi, who went to Beijing with all her children and grand-children in tow, has also just followed on with her best wishes.

Question is, why did Sonia Gandhi go to Beijing? South Block is putting on the bravest face of all, insisting that party matters cannot be discussed by government officials. Even if Sonia was invited by the Communist Party of China, which runs the country, in her capacity as the president of the Congress party -- and therefore, runs the country -- she didnt have to accept. Of course, she didnt want to miss the once-in-a-lifetime spectacle that are the Beijing Games. Nor did her son, who is a party general secretary. As for the children missing school, that's a decision that is entirely up to the discretion of parents Priyanka and Robert.

Still, its a little amusing the way Indian politicians irrespective of party line, carry their brood with them when they are in power. Presumably hospitality is on the house (of the foreign government) and if it isnt, the kids can all be accommodated as part of the pack, anyway. I remember when H D Deve Gowda, the self-proclaimed farmer who announced that he never wanted to get out of Karnataka, was "persuaded" to become prime minister of the United Front government in 1996. On his first visit to the G-15 summit in Harare the same year, journalists on board Air India One stared in disbelief as Gowda's grand-brood was seen walking up the steps of the big Jumbo, with water-bottles slung across their shoulders.

We counted, slowly. There were 15 of them, the sons and daughters of several sons and daughters and in laws. The summit was immediately dubbed (G)owda-15, and the PM never lived it down. On board, we noted, that the kids were trying to play shuttle-*** in the galley, it was that cute. Gowda's media adviser H K Dua was hard put to explain their itinerary to Sun City (that is why the water bottles) and other South African game parks, a short plane ride away from Harare, in between India's trade policy vis-a-vis the developed/developing worlds.

The other brouhaha around children came to the surface when President K R Narayanan travelled to Paris after India's nuclear tests in 1999, and both his daughters, Chitra and Amrita travelled with him. Actually, it was Chitra, an IFS officer who preferred to live in Rashtrapati Bhawan rather than in an government flat, who used to travel with him, while Amrita, who is married to an American, would catch the flight to the city where her father was going, from the US. I remember Narayanan's Paris visit because of the noise around a Parisian newspaper's take on India's Dalit president who had risen to the highest office in the land. Many of us felt the story was actually a compliment, except Narayanan. India's ambassador in Paris at the time, we heard later, was diplomatically ticked off because he hadnt been able to appropriately educate Paris' journalists on the intricacies of India's caste structure.

Anyway, the story about Chitra, Amrita and her husband in Paris was hardly new, although several voices, completely off the record, could be heard grumbling about the TA/DA the government had to pay up ! (Evidently, they got it in full !) The family also accompanied the President to Beijing, the first high-level visit by an Indian to China after the nuclear tests, when Beijing and Delhi had been icy cool towards each other. Apart from the fact that Narayanan was being accompanied by his children, there was the fact of his American son-in-law being part of the President's entourage. But no questions were asked, or answered, in the media.

Sonia Gandhi's large Indian family junket to Beijing is somewhat different of course, because Sonia is not a minister in the government, and presumably she or her family will bear their personal expenses. In her case, its never about the money, but about the nature of power, how it is symbolised in her person, and how she uses it.

First of all, the Chinese never invited prime minister Manmohan Singh to the Games, a diplomatic snub if there was one. All that talk about the PM having been in January already and likely to go in October for the East Asia summit, so why should he go to Beijing in August for the third time, is frankly cowwash. The PM wasnt invited, Sonia Gandhi was. You must tip your metaphorical hat to the Chinese for daring to go right inside the lion's den, especially when talk of China being against India's nuclear deal was pretty much burning up the front pages of many Indian newspapers.

Thousands of years of negotiating with authority have taught the Chinese the utter beauty of politics, of the complete calm associated with both depravity and morality. The Sonia invitation was a perfect tease, loaded with decades of innuendo, and Delhi fell for it. No one, probably, had the courage to tell Sonia Gandhi why she should have refused. After all, she's not the prime minister or the president, both of whom are supported by the advice of countless mandarins. Sonia can perhaps turn to Karan Singh for advice, because he is currently the chair of the Congress foreign affairs cell. (Look, though, at his comments that the Amarnath shrine board should be given the hundred acres of land, exactly the same as the BJP.) Most people in the party dont seem to have the kind of equation with her that would allow them to tell her to do the right thing, without fear or favour.

Since things are hardly likely to change anytime soon, perhaps Sonia should stick to the one rule of thumb that has bailed her out of many a tight corner, all these years : Would Rajiv have done what I am doing?

If she'd asked herself the question on going to Beijing, the answer would have been a quiet No. After all, unlike Abhinav Bindra, how many medals was Sonia going to get for India in Beijing?

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Bob Dylan in Sri Lanka

Jyoti Malhotra — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 12:47:00 GMT

When you're travelling with this Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, journeys to paradise -- even if its the Sri Lankan version -- dont last more than a couple of days. The PM's likes to get into the foreign country he perforce has to visit -- part of the job of being prime minister I guess -- does his work and gets out. This two-day trip to Sri Lanka was to attend the SAARC summit, and considering most South Asians favour the lowest common denominator principle, its fairly astonishing that any work gets done at all.

This time there was more bureaucratese in the form of a mutual legal assistance pact for criminals (what?), and if youre wondering if the Afghans can ask Pakistan to extradite terrorists they have information have taken part in terrorist attacks in their country, or the Indians can ask Pakistan for some terrorists of their own -- and vice-versa I assume -- and the Indians can ask the Bangladeshis...you get the drift? Its all really a no-no. Pacts will be followed up by joint commissions and task forces and more mechanisms. In real life, it just doesnt work that way.

So whats the use of it all, you might ask? Its a question that many of us have been posing for years and years...No wonder the accompanying horde of journalists prefers to focus on the bilaterals, at least you get some news out that way. Did Hamid Karzai get any promises out of Yousuf Raza Gilani on probing terrorist attacks in Afghanistan? Did Manmohan Singh get anything out of Gilani? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. South Asian jamborees are a Bob Dylanesque dream come true.

Its time to turn your attention back to paradise. After all, its nor for nothing that Sri Lanka, when it was "discovered" all those hundreds of years ago by Dutch sailors was called Serendip. The ocean calls for attention, an ancient, hypnotic roar that centres the universe. Beyond the ocean and the city, the green-green vegetation is biding its time so that it can take over the decaying landscape -- when the time is ripe.

The smell of decay exists in the same breath as the promise of renewal in the strong undertug of the creeper, the insistently flowering bushes, the accompanying overlay of jasmine perfume and the fat, perhaps strange,but nevertheless luscious fruit that hangs above. Watch out for the latter though, its a missile wrapped up in several juicy layers that can stun you forever if you stand beneath its unsuspecting branches.

When the roads open -- and you can be assured they're shut for long hours of the day when some of the world's most insecure leaders, Karzai, Manmohan Singh, Gilani, are all in town -- you can wend your way to the little Buddhist temple in the middle of the lake behind Galle Road. Its an open temple, built in carved, slim columns of wood and raised on a concrete platform to look like stilts. All around, there are several statues of the Buddha, his slit, slightly downcast eyes looking straight into your soul. A little concrete slab connects this to another small raised platform, on which there's another massive statue of the Buddha. Around him, statues of Hindu gods like Ganesh and Shiva. Its simply awesome.

Just across the road is the bigger Ganga Rama temple, with massive statues of the Buddha surrounded by bevies of beauties and angels and helpers, painted and carved in a turn--of-the-century Western spirit. The building itself is a colonial structure, reminiscent of the architecture of more than a hundred years ago, when the Dutch and then the British firmly placed their stamp on paradise. The amalgam is astonishing, a tribute to the Buddhist-Hindu spirit where time has little meaning and the cycle of life encompasses everything. A Buddhist monk is giving a lecture in an adjoining hall, and women in saris and long skirts are in attendance.

Outside, the oil lamps are being lit, their wicks bunched together in multiples of threes. In a country where a civil war has been raging for the last 25 years (the first ethnic riots between Sinhalas and Sri Lankan Tamils took place in 1983) and so many hundreds of people have fallen to the assassin's bullet, togetherness is an idea still very much in the present continuous.

The darkness is falling, already, and a few hundred yards away, South Asia's top leaders are mouthing platitudes on the need to improve their region. Many of these politicians have been elected, but seem to have already forgotten their promises they made to the people, to become less poor and more able. If India's wallowing in double-digit inflation, Sri Lanka's own has touched 30 per cent -- officially. They forget that the SAARC promise was to promote economic integration, to build bridges so that the blood and the gore of terrorist strikes can be neutered.

Day's done. Even in paradise, you have to learn and live and fight for a better tomorrow.

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It is the Indian Ocean, isn't it?

Jyoti Malhotra — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 08:48:00 GMT

When some of the world's most insecure leaders are gathered within one square mile of each other, what kind of security can you expect?

Turns out that Sri Lanka, which wanted to host the 15th SAARC summit here in Colombo on August 2-3 so as to commemmorate the 60th anniversary of its independence from Britain -- and Maldives, whose turn it was to do so was happy to acquiesce, because it didnt want the attention that hundreds of journalists would draw towards the longest running dictatorship in the world of president Abdul Maumoon Gayoom -- has employed nearly 20,000 extra police and soldiers in the city to protect South Asia's eight leaders who have turned up for the summit.

There's Afghan president Hamid Karzai, embattled within his hometown Kabul, and who has openly accused Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, of supporting the Taliban against his government.

There's Pakistan's newish prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani who has just concluded his visit to the US where he was diplomatically rapped on the knuckles by none other than president George Bush, who asked him, "who controls the ISI?"

And there's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in whose defence the Indian security establishment has taken the unprecedented step of deploying two Indian warships just off Sri Lanka's waters, the INS Ranvir and INS Mysore. The Sri Lankan Navy will however provide security within its own territorial waters.

In fact, when Singh landed in Colombo on August 1, three Indian Air Force helicopters were in readiness at the Kattunayake airport, waiting to fly him into the city. Singh and his close aides landed at the Sri Lankan army heliport, from where it was a short ride to the Indian-owned Taj Samudra hotel, within hearing distance of the crashing waves of the Indian Ocean.

Not since 1987, said a Sri Lankan observer, when Rajiv Gandhi and Junius Jayawardene signed the Indo-Sri Lanka accord that brought Indian soldiers into the island to battle the LTTE, have Indian helicopters been seen in Sri Lanka's airspace.

The Indian government's decision to employ the warships has been the focus of some comment in this island nation. There is a precedence, Indian officials have said in defence of their decision, pointing out that when the SAARC summit was held in July 1998, within weeks of India's nuclear tests, one Indian warship was out there to secure then prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee.

"The presence of the Indian warships are a show of strength by India of its power and presence in the Indian Ocean," said an observer in Colombo.

Indian officials, flushed with the approval of the Indo-US nuclear deal by the IAEA in Vienna, perhaps feel the time has come for India to exercise its presence in the Indian Ocean. "It is the Indian Ocean after all, isnt it," asked one Indian official, only somewhat in jest.

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Singh is a nuclear Kinng!

Jyoti Malhotra — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:19:00 GMT

Every day that I have been Prime Minister of India I have tried to remember that the first ten years of my life were spent in a village with no drinking water supply, no electricity, no hospital, no roads and nothing that we today associate with modern living. I had to walk miles to school, I had to study in the dim light of a kerosene oil lamp. This nation gave me the opportunity to ensure that such would not be the life of our children in the foreseeable future.

Its been such a long journey for Manmohan Singh, from Gah in Pakistan’s Jhang district to New Delhi, India, but on the evening of Day Two in parliament, one slogan was writ large all over the TV channels : Singh is Kinng !

For four years, Manmohan Singh struggled to find a face in the large shadow cast about by Sonia Gandhi’s cloak. As Congressmen of all shapes and sizes wheedled in and out of her consciousness, Singh kept out of the limelight, wincing almost perceptibly each time he had to soil his hands in the cesspool of pragmatic politics. He may have been prime minister, but she was clearly, the boss.

All that changed tonight as Manmohan Singh dared to risk everything – his reputation, his government, the political lives of a few hundred members of parliament who owe allegiance to the UPA – and he won. With Sonia Gandhi behind him “one thousand percent”, Singh gambled with the idea of shaping a new India.

If he’d lost, he would have been condemned as a latter-day Yudhisthira, who didn’t stop to think as he gambled it all away in that moment of dice-lust.

L K Advani, BJP’s top leader, with whom Manmohan Singh seems to share a special, mutual aversion, would have turned the “weakest PM” epithet into a dull knife that would have hurt, especially on grey, wintry days, full of age, regret and recrimination.

But Manmohan Singh won, and history loves winners. Nations love winners, especially when they have new visions that secretly gobble up the cobwebs of the mind.

All the clichés apply tonight, to Manmohan Singh. He’s come out of Sonia Gandhi’s large, enveloping, Superwoman-like shadow, a man of the moment, in charge. With Manmohan Singh, such is the euphoria tonight over the vote of confidence engendered by the Indo-US nuclear deal, we could even argue that India’s time to share the international high table has come.

Pity Manmohan Singh wasn’t allowed to read out his speech in parliament, although looking back, it seems of a pattern in his relationship with the BJP. Over the last four years, each time the PM and Advani have met or spoken, they’ve spat. Advani has used all kinds of unparliamentary language with Manmohan Singh, reserving the “weakest PM” quote for specially tender moments.

Listen to the PM’s reply that-would-have-been if the BJP hadn’t disrupted the Lok Sabha tonight : “The Leader of Opposition, Shri L.K. Advani has chosen to use all manner of abusive objectives to describe my performance. He has described me as the weakest Prime Minister, a ‘nikamma’ PM, and of having devalued the office of PM. To fulfill his ambitions, he has made at least three attempts to topple our government. But on each occasion his astrologers have misled him. This pattern, I am sure, will be repeated today. At his ripe old age, I do not expect Shri Advani to change his thinking. But for his sake and India’s sake, I urge him at least to change his astrologers so that he gets more accurate predictions of things to come."

Astrologers? Advani? And we thought that former prime minister H F Deve Gowda, who took the Congress’ help to secure seats for his party in Karnataka recently and should have, according to the honour-among- thieves credo that politicians usually uphold, reciprocated the gesture by voting with the Manmohan Singh government tonight – and didn’t – because the astrologers had told him not to !

There’s no doubt that tonight belonged to the PM. Lalu Yadav may have decimated the combined Left-BJP opposition, and it was a pity that he hadn’t been unleashed earlier on them, but it was Manmohan Singh’s decision to dare to dream – and ask what you can do for your country – that has perceptibly changed the balance of power in Delhi.

Sonia Gandhi will still be queen of the UPA, but the PM will definitely command new respect. He began this controversy 11 months ago by telling a journalist from the Telegraph that if the Left parties don’t agree with the nuclear deal, “…so be it,” and he’s lived to complete the tale.

In one of the most acerbic lines in his unspoken speech tonight, Singh said, “Our friends in the Left Front should ponder over the company they are forced to keep (with the BJP) because of miscalculations by their General Secretary.”

Singh’s pistols are still smoking from the verbal assault on Prakash Karat. Clearly, all those “pehle aap” days are now over. In this new movie that’s just hit town, Singh is the newest nuclear Kinng!

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The Bengali and the Marxist (with apologies to Amitav Ghosh)

Jyoti Malhotra — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:10:00 GMT

The morning after Day One in Parliament, where the UPA government's trust vote is being debated on the Indo-US nuclear deal -- today, that is July 22, the vote will take place -- the Bengali and the Marxist (with apologies to Amitav Ghosh, for letting this sound like a novel by him) emerged as the two real heroes of the day. Foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee, who for the first time in his nearly fifty-year-old experience in politics, is currently elected from Jangipur constitutency in West Bengal, with the help of the CPM of course -- wiped clean all those whispering insinuations from these months past with a right rousing speech in the Lok Sabha in favour of the nuclear deal and against the Left.

The other is Somnath Chatterjee, Speaker and CPM partyman, but more of him later in the blog.

Over the last year, as the Left has charged, accused and fulminated against the Manmohan Singh-led government for selling out to George Bush over the Indo-US nuclear deal, Mukherjee got perceptibly more irritable. Not once, though, were stories against the Left leaked from his side of the stable, nor were there any enthusiastic rumours, with him playing the lead, about ramming through the nuclear deal right down the throats of the comrades. Mukherjee is the eternal compromiser, and it is said that in his veins politics runs thicker than blood. He has known better than most the imperative to get the nuclear deal through, but also realised that without the Left, it would be impossible to keep the government. So over the last year, as the deal clocked away interminably, Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and Pranab Mukherjee, each in their own ways, side-stepped, circumvented, ducked the issue, but never once took on the Left. While the prime minister, it was well-known, was more than once willing to risk the government, and Sonia kept her own counsel, it fell upon Mukherjee to run the coalition on a daily basis. He did -- in between his travels as foreign minister and even as the push-me-pull-you mantra got stronger by the day. Thats when it began to be whispered, sometimes even softly, that Pranab Mukherjee is not as hard on the Left because he needs the comrades to help him get elected from Jangipur.

That was a cruel cut, and we all finally knew it when we heard his rousing oratory in Bengali-accented English on the morning of July 21. First of all, he crisply ticked off BJP leader LK Advani for accusing Jawaharlal Nehru of not doing enough for India's nuclear independence, especially with regard to the Nuclear-Non Proliferation treaty. That was because Mukherjee said, the NPT came together in 1970 and Nehru died in 1964, and dead men (usually) dont sign treaties. Then, when the combined Left-BJP Opposition had risen up in a chorus of anger and recrimination, Mukherjee charged at them with a poisoned arrow : Remember 1988, remember the Calcutta Maidan, he said, sounding like a latter-day Banquo premonition. The reference was to leaders like Jyoti Basu and L K Advani coming together for a political rally in Calcutta in 1988 in the run-up to both supporting VP Singh's government one year later at the Centre.

The Left was now totally infuriated. This was the man who had --supposedly -- led them to believe for the last one year that he was trying to find a compromise to the nuclear deal? You could hear the grinding of their teeth, almost. As the House collapsed in a cacophony of sound, only Mukherjee's voice could be heard, shouting as well, on the House headphones : Remember...

One Bengali journalist now says that Dada, as Mukherjee is fondly known outside the Foreign Office, will win by a margin or over a lakh votes from Jangipur. He doesnt need the Left anymore, said the journalist.

As for the Marxist, there was none as polite and cultured and deadpan as Somnath Chatterjee on Monday morning. All these past days, the rumours had raged about the CPM asking him to step down from his post as Speaker, otherwise he would be denounced -- and possibly, expelled and then airbrushed, out of history. It was said that Chatterjee, a member of the Party since 1968, needed to come out when the party needed him most. It was a family, after all, wasnt it. But Chatterjee, a right honourable member of the Bengali bhadralok or genteel class, did not succumb. He had been a non-partisan Speaker for four years, when he had been unanimously chosen by 18 parties in the Lok Sabha in June 2004, he was not about to step down now and vote against the Congress ! History was being made in India, and Chatterjee's wife Renu and their two daughters, had come to witness it.

Somnath stood by his good word. All day on Monday, right till 10 pm, the Speaker chastised, cajoled, criticised and hustled members of the House when they overstepped their time-limits, addressed other members instead of him, and generally strayed off the parliamentary path. At one time, he scolded the Opposition : You must cultivate the art of listening, how can you reply, if you dont listen. Then, another time, when the professorial Ram Gopal Yadav of the Samajwadi party, rubbing his hands deliciously, poked fun at the 'Lal' in Lal Krishna Advani and likened it to the 'lal' or red in the Left slogan "Lal salaam", and pointed out that two positives could become a negative, Chatterjee butted in : Lal accha rang bhi hai, he said, red is also a good colour !

The whole House collapsed in good-natured laughter. The Speaker was having a dig at the CPM's -- his own -- black and white party line, and also sending the message, perhaps : life's too short not to allow some colour into it !

And now for Day Two !

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