Avsnitt
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com on April 8th at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-generative-ai-creates-challenges-in-intellectual-property-and-epistemology-13757273.html
It is fairly obvious that the dominant, i.e. Western mechanism for generating new knowledge is rather different from the traditional Indian mechanism, and this shows up in all sorts of ways. One is that Indian epistemology seems to be empirical and practical, based on observation; whereas the Western tradition seems to prefer grand theories that must then be proved by observation.
Another difference is the Western idea that Intellectual Property is a private right that the State confers on an inventor or a creator. The Western gaze is fixed on the potential monetary gains from a monopoly over the use of the IP Right (for a fixed period of time, after which it is in the public domain): the argument is that it eventually helps everybody, while incentivizing the clever.
The Indian concept is vastly different. It was assumed that a creator created, or an inventor invented, as a result of their innate nature, their god-given gifts. In a way they could not avoid being creative or inventive, which would be a negation of the blessing they had received from the Supreme Brahman. Therefore no further incentive was needed: benevolent patrons like kings or temples would take care of their basic needs, allowing them to give free rein to creativity and innovation.
This seems to us today to be a radical idea, because we have been conditioned by the contemporary epistemological idea that incentives are a necessary condition for knowledge creation. Although this seems common-sensical, there is no real evidence that this is true. Petra Moser, then at MIT, discovered via comparing 19th century European countries that the presence of an IPR culture with incentives made little difference in the quantum of innovation, although it seemed to change the domains that were the most innovative..
In fact, there is at least one counter-example: that of Open Source in computing. It boggles the imagination that veritable armies of software developers would work for free, nights and weekends, in addition to their full-time jobs, and develop computing systems like Linux that are better than the corporate versions out there: the whole “Cathedral and Bazaar” story as articulated by Eric Raymond. Briefly, he argues that the chaotic ‘bazaar’ of open source is inherently superior to the regimented but soul-less ‘cathedral’ of the big tech firms.
It is entirely possible that the old Indian epistemological model is efficient, but the prevailing model of WIPO, national Patent Offices, and all that paraphernalia massively benefits the Western model. As an example, the open-source model was predicted to make a big difference in biology, but that effort seems to have petered out after a promising start. Therefore we are stuck for the foreseeable future with the IP model, which means Indians need to excel at it.
In passing, let us note that the brilliant Jagdish Chandra Bose was a pioneer in the wireless transmission of information, including the fundamental inventions that make cellular telephony possible. However, as a matter of principle, he refused to patent his inventions; Guglielmo Marconi did, and became rich and famous.
India has traditionally been quite poor in the number of patents, trademarks, copyrights, geographical indications, semiconductor design layouts etc. that it produces annually. Meanwhile the number of Chinese patents has skyrocketed. Over the last few years, the number of Indian patents has grown as the result of focused efforts by the authorities, as well as the realization by inventors that IP rights can help startup firms dominate niche markets.
India also produces a lot of creative works, including books, films, music and so on. The enforcement of copyright laws has been relatively poor, and writers and artistes often do not get fair compensation for their work. This is deplorable.
Unfortunately, things will get a lot worse with generative AI. Most of us have heard of, and probably also tried out, the chatbots that have been the object of much attention and hype in the past year, such as chatGPT from OpenAI/Microsoft and Bard from Google. Whether these are truly useful is a good question, because they seduce us into thinking they are conscious, despite the fact that they are merely ‘stochastic parrots’. But I digress.
The point is that the digital revolution has thrown the edifice of copyright law into disarray. At the forefront of this upheaval stands generative AI, a technology with the uncanny ability to mimic and extend human creative output. Consider two stark examples: the contentious case of J.K. Rowling and her copyright battle with a Harry Potter-inspired fanfic, and the recent Japanese law that grants broad exemptions for training large language models (LLMs).
J.K. Rowling's spat with Anna M. Bricken, the author of a Harry Potter fanfic titled "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Wine," ignited a global debate about fair use and transformative creativity. Bricken's work reimagined the Potterverse with an adult lens, but Rowling, citing trademark infringement, sought to have it taken down.
While the case eventually settled, it exposed a fundamental dilemma: can AI-generated works, even if derivative, be considered distinct enough from their source material to warrant copyright protection? The answer, shrouded in legal ambiguity, leaves creators navigating a tightrope walk between inspiration and infringement.
On the other side of the globe, Japan enacted a law in 2022 that further muddies the waters. This controversial regulation grants LLMs and other AI systems an almost carte blanche to ingest and remix copyrighted material for training purposes without seeking permission or paying royalties. While proponents laud it as a catalyst for AI innovation, critics warn of widespread copyright infringement and a potential future where authorship becomes a nebulous concept. The Japanese law, echoing anxieties around J.K. Rowling's case, raises unsettling questions: who owns the creative spark when AI fuels the fire?
For India, a nation at the precipice of the AI revolution, these developments raise crucial questions. With a burgeoning AI industry and a large creative sector, India must tread carefully. Adapting existing copyright laws to encompass the nuances of AI-generated works is paramount. Robust fair use guidelines that incentivize transformative creativity while safeguarding original authorship are urgently needed. Furthermore, fostering ethical AI development practices that respect intellectual property rights is crucial.
The debate surrounding AI and copyright is not merely a legal tussle; it's a battle for the very definition of creativity. In this fight, India has the opportunity to carve a path that balances innovation with artistic integrity. By acknowledging the complexities of AI while upholding the cornerstone principles of copyright, India can become a global leader in navigating the uncharted territory of digital authorship. The future of creativity, fueled by both human imagination and AI's boundless potential, hangs in the balance, and India has the chance to shape its trajectory.
Disclaimer: The last few paragraphs above were written by Google Bard, and lightly edited. A chatbot can produce coherent text, but it may be, and often is, completely wrong (‘hallucinations’). Now who owns the copyright to this text? Traditionally, it would be owned by me and Firstpost, but what is the right answer now? Would we be responsible for any errors introduced by the AI?
On the other hand, the ‘mining’ of text, audio/video and images to train generative AI is an increasingly contentious issue. As an example, the New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing that they weren’t being paid anywhere near the fair market value of their text that the tech companies mined.
This sounds familiar to Indians, because Westerners have been ‘digesting’ Indian ideas for a long time. Some of the most egregious examples were patents on basmati, turmeric and neem, which are absurd considering that these have been in use in India for millennia. The fact that these were documented in texts (‘prior art’) enabled successful challenges against them.
An even more alarming fact is the capture and ‘digestion’ (a highly evocative term from Rajiv Malhotra, who has warned of the dangers of AI for years) of Indian personal and medical data. Unlike China, which carefully firewalls away its data from Western Big Tech, and indeed, does not even allow them to function in their country, Indian personal data is being freely mined by US Big Tech. India’s Data Privacy laws, being debated now, need to be considered defensive weapons.
Paradoxically, there is also the concern that Indic knowledge will, for all intents and purposes, disappear from the domain of discourse. Since the chatbots are trained on the uncurated Internet, they are infected by the Anglosphere prejudices and bigotry therein, not to mention deliberate misinformation and ‘toolkits’ that are propagated.
Since most Indic concepts are either not very visible, or denigrated, on the Internet (eg Wikipedia), chatbots are not even aware of them. For instance, a doctor friend and I published an essay in Open magazine comparing allopathy to generative AI, because both are stochastic (ie. based on statistics). We mentioned Ayurveda positively several times, because it has a theory of disease that makes it more likely to work with causation rather than correlation.
However, when the article summarized by chatGPT, there was no mention whatsoever of the word ‘Ayurveda’. It is as though such a concept does not exist, which may in fact be true in the sense that it is deprecated in the training data that the chatbot was trained on.
One solution is to create Indian foundational models that can then become competent in specific domains of interest: for example an Arthashastra chatbot. These can also be trained, if sufficient data sets are created, on Indian languages as well, which could incidentally support real-time machine translation as well. Thus there can be an offensive as well as a defensive strategy to enable Indic knowledge systems to thrive.
India is at a point of crisis, but also of opportunity. If India were to harness some of the leading-edge technologies of today, it might once again become a global leader in knowledge generation, as it was a millennium ago with its great universities.
1680 words, Jan 10, 2024 updated Apr 7, 2024
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com -
A version of this essay was published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-hamas-war-is-an-immediate-setback-to-india/20231017.htm
It can be argued on several grounds that the 2023 Israel-Hamas war is a point of inflection indicating the general eclipse of the West, and in fact I have done so in an essay. What is unclear is how the end of this era will play out in the medium term and the long term.
The best analogy I can think of is the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria by a Serbian nationalist in 1914 or so, and how that set in motion a chain of events that, among other things, ended the European and Ottoman empires over the next forty or fifty years, and more immediately caused the so-called Great War, now re-framed as World War I.
Chaos theory at work: as the saying goes, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil setting off a tornado in Texas.
There is the obvious concern that the Israel-Hamas war could set off World War III, especially given that there are many nuclear weapons in the possession of the belligerents and their friends. Iran has recovered from the debacle of the Stuxnet computer worm that caused their Uranium-enrichment centrifuges to blow up (in what was then lauded as an unacknowledged triumph of American and Israeli cloak-and-dagger and technical know-how).
Then there is Pakistan and its rapidly growing arsenal, no doubt helped along by screwdriver assembly of Chinese components, and perhaps knocked-down kits. Pakistan is one of the most vocal supporters of Palestine as an Ummah cause, which is ironic considering that Pakistani soldiers (and maybe irregulars) seconded to Jordan in 1970 during the Black September uprising may have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of Palestinians.
The specter of an encompassing World War III is sobering, and just as the crumbling League of Nations was unable to fend off earlier editions of world wars, the toothless United Nations is now unlikely to be able to prevent a new one. It hasn't been able to prevent all the smaller conflicts, such as the Ukraine war, and it is obvious that major powers simply don't care about the UN's exertions and bloviations. Therefore, one of the biggest fears is that the Hamas attack might seed a larger conflagration.
Of immediate concern, though, is that a nascent process of normalization in West Asia may now grind to a halt. This can have global consequences. It is likely that the earlier edition of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Yom Kippur War of 1973, led directly to the Arab oil embargo followed by the shock of their quadruplication of oil prices. This caused inflation in the US, but more seriously, it precipitated a massive transfer of wealth from developing countries, which set them back by decades, compounding human misery.
There are thus unforeseen consequences to what happens in West Asia, which, barring some miracle, will continue to dominate energy supplies for the next couple of decades, even if the most optimistic Green initiatives come to fruition. Things are obviously different from 1973, with West Asians (especially Saudi Arabia) much more self-confident, immensely richer, and also cognizant of the fact that their oil/gas bonanzas will run out sooner or later. They need to diversify their economies, and possibly make some new friends, other than those who are dazzled by their petro-dollars.
It is this realization that led to the landmark Abraham Accords, whereby several Arab nations normalized their relations with Israel. The general expectation has been that Saudi Arabia would follow suit, and Mohammed bin Salman has been signaling that he is willing to do this (but also, in his own national interest, willing to embrace China and the proposed BRICS+ currency, both of which would be setbacks for the US and the collective West). The biggest geopolitical casualty of the Hamas war is that this normalization will be put on hold.
Saudi Arabia simply cannot appear to be mindless of the plight of the largely Muslim Palestinians, even if they are nervous about the decidedly fundamentalist Hamas, who, in an interesting twist, may well be aligning themselves with Shia Iran, the principal regional foe of the Sunni Saudis. However, what is also worth noting is that the Saudis, as well as Egyptians and other Arabs, are all reluctant to resettle Palestinians in their largely empty, and rich, countries.
There might be two reasons for this: one, perhaps it is still the ambition of the Arab States to eliminate Israel and wipe it off the map altogether (which is what they, and Iran, proclaimed loudly in the past, although it is not clear this is actually feasible any more). If so, maintaining Palestinians as an aggrieved quasi-nation, which would supply an endless stream of militants to the Hamases and Hezbollahs of the region, is a viable, if brutal, strategy.
Two, Arab States may not actually want Palestinians as refugees because they might cause all sorts of domestic problems. This always puzzled me, because on average the Palestinians of 1948 were much better educated than most other Arabs, and could have contributed to other Arab nations. My conjecture is that, given the examples of Pakistani migrants in Britain, the Black September Palestinians in Jordan, and more recent Syrian etc refugees in Europe – easily radicalized and prone to blood-curdling rhetoric and possibly action against their host nations – Arab States want to keep them out.
This could be the real reason Egypt refuses to open the border for the fleeing residents of Gaza..
It is a bit like the Rohingya of Myanmar. They have a reputation for being troublesome radical Islamists, and so nobody wants to take them in: not Bangladesh where they originally hail from, not any Arab States, not Pakistan (although some Westerners suggested that India and China should take them. China laughed in their faces, but India dutifully did so).
Given all this, and the growing clout of Israel under the American security umbrella, chances are that the Palestinian cause would have become increasingly less relevant to Saudis and other Arabs. And that is precisely what might have motivated Hamas and friends: with the emergent normalization of ties with Israel in the region, and initiatives like i2u2 (Israel, India, US, UAE) and IMEC (India Middle East Europe Corridor), there would be commercial and trade ties that would bind.
After all, a major part of these trade corridors would be the infrastructure links (railway lines through Saudi Arabia, the Israeli port of Haifa) that would offer alternative trade routes to Europe from India and Southeast Asia. This would offend China too, because its grand Belt and Road Initiative and trans-European railway links would see less business. Thus, in passing, China also is a winner in this Great Game as West Asia goes on the boil, along with usual suspects Iran, Qatar and Turkey.
Thus, from several points of view, this Hamas war is an immediate setback to India: it is one of the few countries in the region that enjoys good relations with both Israel and Saudi Arabia, and IMEC would allow it to recreate the old Spice Route to Europe, which was highly lucrative over millennia. All this is in jeopardy now. The strategic and under-construction Vizhinjam container transhipment port in Thiruvananthapuram is a key part of this ambitious trade route.
India also has interests in Iran: the Chabahar port could enable India to create an alternative route to Central Asia and Russia called the INSTC (International North South Transport Corridor) bypassing trouble-prone Pakistan and Afghanistan (although that long-pending logistics link is years behind schedule). India cannot allow its relations with Iran to be affected by the war in Gaza.
More broadly, if world trade collapses and/or a war begins now it would be unfortunate timing for India. This is the very moment India is ready to finally leave behind the bitter legacy of colonialism, which looted enormous wealth from India (I have argued it was $10 trillion, but economist Utsa Patnaik puts the figure at $45 trillion). A collapse in the procedures of the ‘liberal, rules-based international order’, however biased it is in favor of the West, is unfortunate for India in the medium term, although it would probably be fine in the longer term.
There are two other aspects of the response to Gaza that are notable. The first is the rise of ugly anti-Jewish sentiments in many parts of the West. This is of concern to Indians, specifically Hindus, because Hindu-hatred is anti-semitism 2.0 and Hindus cannot wish it away.
On the other hand, the Left was startled by the dramatic reaction from American Jews to standard Left positioning of moral equivalence between Hamas and the Israeli Defense Forces. For instance, several Harvard student groups released statements about their support for Palestine and/or Hamas, which probably was seeded by Pakistani and, alas, woke Indian-origin students in their ranks.
Retribution was swift: Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, in effect asked fellow CEOs to blacklist these students. There was furious backpedaling as many students, worried about their job prospects, protested that the statements were made without consulting them.
This is positive. The Woke Left in the US is splintering. That may mean the Democratic Party tactic of uber-wokeism may now backfire on them, especially notable as elections are looming in the US. The less the wokeism around, the better for India (see Justin Trudeau’s Khalistan antics).
The weakening of Western power and resolve vis a vis China is another problem for India. The West simply cannot supply munitions for multiple wars (Ukraine, Gaza, and possibly Taiwan), partly because the US has been deindustrialized. What we might see in the medium term is the deprecation of US power in the Indo-Pacific, and indeed a fallback to isolationism and Fortress America. This would encourage a China that is just waiting to rampage.
The current Israel-Hamas war is a net negative for India; the issue of Western Hindu-hatred is a topic for another day.
1650 words, 16 October 2023
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-does-the-war-in-israel-mark-the-end-of-pax-occidentalis-13235762.html
The attack by Hamas on Israel may well be remembered in future as marking the very moment the decline of the West became an indubitable fact. Thus October 7th, 2023 may be a point of inflection in geo-politics and geo-economics, although it is true that the economic center of gravity of the world has been moving eastwards (and southwards in future) for some time.
The question really goes to the heart of the so-called ‘liberal rules-based international order’, which is a nice euphemism for ‘America and friends lay out the rules’. To give credit where it is due, this was a pretty good paradigm for the post-World-War-II period, and it helped much of Europe and East Asia advance economically, although it didn’t help India, Africa or Latin America much (and that was partly due to poorly thought-out self-imposed policies as well).
But like all empires and quasi-empires, this one has also deteriorated over time, partly as it was based on the presupposition of overwhelming American dominance. The US was supposed to be the global policeman who could arbitrate if necessary, and offer a bracing dose of punishment if someone erred. But that is no longer the case, as the US is bogged down in arguably futile wars.
The rot goes much deeper, and affects every institution that has been built up by the ‘liberal, rules-based international order’. All of us thought the UN and in particular the Security Council would be champions at preserving world order, unlike the hapless League of Nations. But it has proven singularly ineffective, and the media didn’t even quote the Secretary General or the Security Council making a pro forma plea for peace in Israel on October 7th.
The World Health Organization was another entity that lost much of its credibility in the wake of its hapless performance during the coronavirus pandemic. UNESCO has long since become a woke fortress, shorn of its earlier importance. The World Bank and IMF are so often handmaidens of Western agendas and dogmas (see “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”) that nobody mourns their eclipse as new lending institutions arise.
The Nobel Prizes, we were brought up to believe, were the ultimate in impartial recognition of excellence. Perhaps in the sciences they still have some value, but the moment the Peace Prize was given to Henry Kissinger (and Le Duc Tho who had the grace to reject it), it became evident that it was political. Of course, never giving the Literature Prize to Leo Tolstoy had damaged it way back (Sully Prudhomme got it instead. Sully, a household name!).
The less said about the Economics Prize the better. Just look at the Indian-origin winners or the New York Times columnist. I think I can rest my case.
In passing, there is this reputation that the Scandinavians have for fair play, partly because of the Nobels, and partly, I imagine, because they are blond, blue-eyed Vikings. But increasingly I have noticed that their antics on the environment (“How dare you!”), on politics (“we can judge the quality of your democracy via V-dem index”), on psychology (“happiness index”) and various others things suggest that some gaslighting is going on. But that’s just by the way.
The other institutions that we have always depended on are the media. It was practically a given for most of us that the BBC was objective and trustworthy, the VoA a little less so, and Pravda was full of propaganda. The NYT was the gold standard, the Economist and the FT were, if not paragons, worthy of respectful attention, despite charges of ‘manufacturing consent’.
And the Lancet was impeccable, the very fountainhead of medical wisdom. During covid, it was stunning to find them endorsing research by an entity called Surgisphere, which, I wrote at the time in “Pious Frauds” (Open Magazine, June 2020), was a naked scam with the intention of deprecating a cheap off-patent medicine called hydroxychloroquine or HCQ. Let us compare prices: Rs. 6.25 for HCQ, Rs. 30,000 for Remdesivir. That must mean something.
Over the last year or so, revelation after revelation has exposed the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex’ as a handmaiden of governments; particularly shocking has been the suggestion that the Biden administration has been hand-in-hand with Big Tech in defenestrating anybody whom the Thought Police did not like, eg those who opposed vaccine mandates.
To be blunt, you cannot take Facebook/Meta, Google, YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Wikipedia, or any other Big Tech outlet at face value; parenthetically, and for different reasons, you cannot take anything spewed by chatbots like chatGPT or Google Bard seriously either. Twitter/X, after Elon Musk’s takeover, seems to be the least compromised news outlet available.
But the real kicker comes with Mossad and Five Eyes, and Israel’s total unpreparedness for the Hamas offensive. Mossad is legendary for its almost superhuman acts to protect Israeli lives and property, and is the world’s most admired intelligence agency. On top of this, there is the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing mechanism among the Anglosphere. In the recent past, we have heard a lot about this in the context of Justin Trudeau and Khalistanis.
The impression that I, for one, had was that these people were masters at intelligence gathering, with sophisticated technical means including satellite reconnaissance that could spot any substantial logistics on the ground. It would have taken a lot of organization to gather 5,000 rockets and dozens of pickup trucks and hundreds of fighters, but none of this registered on their signals intelligence or human intelligence?
That is hard to believe. Except for the likelihood that Mossad and the Israeli armed forces have been distracted by the internal squabbles between Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Israeli Supreme Court. The usually apolitical security services took sides in what is partly a divide between white Ashkenazi and brown/black Mizrahi, with religious orthodoxy thrown in. (It is a stark reminder to Indians, especially the INDI alliance, that a house divided will fall.)
Yes, it is hard to believe the combined might of the Anglosphere did not anticipate the Hamas invasion catastrophe. Maybe they did not want to prevent it? That would be criminal, considering the sufferings of Israeli civilians, as well as what’s to come for Palestinian civilians when Israel, as it always does, hits back hard in Gaza.
A Jewish writer in Tablet Magazine, Liel Leibowitz, accused the Israeli ruling class of “cosplaying some game of Demokratia, complete with donning handmaid outfits and ululating about fascism”, and of entertaining “the fantasy that the United States was and always would be their protector—when in fact the ruling party in America has decided that Israel is a liability”. The same magazine, in March, accused the US Deep State of instigating Israel’s internal squabbles.
That is harsh, but in a nutshell it suggests that America in particular, and the West in general, is no longer able to, or willing to, run the ‘rules-based liberal international order’. Thus, the end of Pax Americana or Pax Occidentalis may be here. This does not make the world a nicer or easier place: Pax Sinica, for instance, could be brutal (ask the Tibetans). But it suggests that a Pax Indica in the Indian Ocean Rim is a worthwhile goal for India.
1200 words, 10 Oct 2023
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com -
A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-g20-and-its-fallout-india-the-swing-state-imec-and-trudeaus-tantrums-13162212.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
A fortnight after the end of the G20 Summit in New Delhi, it’s worth revisiting what really materialized, and what India can expect out of all the hard work that went into it.
First, the positives. The flawless execution of the Summit is something the Indian leadership and officials deserve to be congratulated on. There were all sorts of things that could have gone wrong – including security worries – but the whole thing was done with clockwork precision. In a way, this is unsurprising: Indians revel in complexity, and surely running this event, despite the VVIP foreigners, was easier than pulling off the Kumbha Mela.
Many pundits had written off the Summit, citing the absence of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, and predicting that it would be next to impossible for there to be a consensus based on which a common declaration could be accepted by all. In the event, the 83-paragraph Leaders’ Declaration, wide-ranging and comprehensive, was seen as a diplomatic triumph, with everybody giving in a little on their positions in the interest of the G20 community.
The fact that NATO members had to swallow a watered-down condemnation of the Ukraine war, without actually naming Russia, has been framed as a ‘climbdown by the West for the sake of G20 unity’ by the Financial Times. That’s pretty good spin, but it was remarkable that they didn’t seem to be bothered by such ‘G20 unity’ at the Bali Summit, 2022.
There are more plausible reasons for this ‘climbdown’. One is that the Ukraine war is not going according to plan, which anticipated Russia being beaten by now, both militarily and financially. On the contrary, the EU continues to be Russia’s biggest customer, by far. So the sanctions have failed, and the EU is probably fed up with energy shortages. Plus, the Ukrainians don’t seem to be making much progress with the much-hyped ‘counteroffensive’. NATO could well be on the point of throwing Zelenskyy under the bus any day now.
The West appears to be backpedaling furiously, and they have made such miscalculations before: 1971, Bangladesh; 1975, Vietnam, and so on. Ironically, POTUS Biden went to Vietnam after the G20 Summit, and announced billions of dollars worth of deals in semiconductors and AI, among other things. What a U-turn from the 1970s! Kissinger would be turning over in his grave, except he’s still alive.
A more optimistic reading of the G20 outcome could well be that India has finally become a swing state. While it is precarious being a swing state, it also has benefits: you get courted by both sides, and you can play them off against each other. India’s persistent and aggressive fence-sitting, combined with its robust economic performance, is now making others pay a little more attention to India’s needs. But it also invites hostility.
There was evidence of this new reality, in a back-handed sort of way, in Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s hissy-fit against India accusing it of a hit-job on a Khalistani terrorist. Trudeau has his own reasons (hurt amour-propre, perhaps), but the Washington Post reported that nobody else in the Anglosphere agreed to support him, with Biden going to great lengths “to avoid antagonizing India and court the Asian power as a strategic counterweight to China”. Even the usually hostile BBC said, “On the grand geopolitical chess board, India is now a key player”. Deep State is not amused. Nor are the rest of the Five Eyes.
India’s transition from ‘non-aligned’ to ‘multi-aligned’ has come at the right time. I do hope India does not get swayed by its own rhetoric of being the ‘champion of the Global South’ and go back to the Nehru-era ‘king of the banana republics’ self-image. Pretending to be the leader of the Third World, and all the NAM exertions got India nothing at all. In 1961, the entire Third World voted 90-1 against India’s decolonization of Goa, which was startling.
However, things are a little different now that India is looking out for its own interests first and foremost. In that context, the formal induction of the African Union into the G20 is a win for India, especially in light of the stacking of BRICS+ with friends of China.
Looking at it from India’s point of view, the African Union means especially East Africa, which is part of the Indian Ocean Rim, India’s backyard. Africa will be the fastest-growing area, in population and GDP, over the next few decades, and the giant continent’s people face problems quite similar to those Indians face. East Africa has millennia-old trade links with India. For instance, a 1500 year old Malabar-built uru, a wooden ship made of teak, was found buried, well preserved in the sands near Alexandria, Egypt, indicating ancient commerce.
It is in the context that the new Spice Route, or the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), is also a good initiative. For one, it is fairly direct competition to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has been dogged by accusations that it is ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ that ends up with valuable assets extorted from others, as in Hambantota port in Sri Lanka, now forced into a 99-year lease agreement as the debt payments became onerous.
Having said that, and despite the fact that a growing India will have more trade with Europe as in the millennia past, it is not entirely clear that the IMEC will take off. On the one hand, there is the history of prized Indian goods like spices, gold, gems, etc. The Roman Pliny the Younger complained that their treasury was being emptied because of the demand for spices and in satisfying “the vanity of [our] women” with cosmetics etc. from India.
India of the future may not become, or may not be allowed to become, a workshop of the world at the scale of China. After all, China will not go off into that good night without raging, raging. An article by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times pointed out that ‘peak China’ may be some time off. I usually disagree with the man, but here I agree: China’s obituaries are a bit premature. It will also double down on a new and improved BRI.
Going back to IMEC, there are also practical difficulties even if the political will and funding can be arranged: the port of Haifa, Israel, which would be a logical choice for it, has a major terminal where China is the concessionaire, and so does the Greek Port of Piraeus. Interestingly enough, Adani Ports has control over the older terminal at Haifa, and is reported to be seeking a terminal at Piraeus as well. How curious that Soros keeps attacking Adani again and again: perhaps he is acting on China’s behalf as well?
Chances are that IMEC will remain a pipe-dream, but there is more of a chance that the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that India has excelled in may be appealing to many other nations. According to the World Bank, India only took 6 years to achieve development that would normally take 47 years, because of the efficiency improvements due to digitization. This is something the Global South can use.
There is also a negative from the G20. The upsurge in infiltration and the huge standoff against terrorists in Anantnag, Jammu and Kashmir, may well be a Chinese signal that they can ratchet up mischief any time, and that the G20 success should not go to India’s head. Given that there is a lot of alleged infiltration into and coziness by the Chinese into the Canadian establishment, Trudeau’s tantrums may also be inspired by China: the other shoe dropping.
All in all, India gets a solid A- for its G20 efforts; the outcomes, alas, may only be a B-.
1300 words, 20 Sept 2023
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On the one hand, there is massive propaganda from the west, ably supported by native sepoys, that India is on the verge of some genocide of Muslims.
On the other hand, last month, the Speaker of the Kerala Assembly, a Muslim, said that Lord Ganesh was “a myth”. Instead of censuring him for hurting the sentiments of Hindus, the ruling communists of Kerala supported him.
This month, Udayanidhi Stalin, a minister, who is also the son of the DMK Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu M K Stalin, said Sanatana Dharma is like dengue, and needs to be eradicated. A former Union Minister, A Raja, compared Hinduism to HIV.
Thus there is de facto discrimination and hate speech against Hindus, and Stalin Jr’s call, for all practical purposes, is an invitation to genocide of Hindus.
Several bigwigs in politics, including the DMK’s allies such as the Congress, instead of censuring Stalin Jr for calling for crimes against humanity, have instead supported him.
Then there is de jure discrimination against Hindus as well. The Constitution through Articles 25-30 appears to give protection to non-Hindus (based on some strange idea that Hindus would oppress them), which has been interpreted by the courts as giving extraordinary privileges to non-Hindus in all sorts of ways. The same is true of governments as well: in fact there are Kerala government job postings reserved exclusively for converts to Christianity, not to mention the pilgrimage concessions given to Muslims and Christians, but not to Hindus.
The Supreme Court, on its own accord, forcefully chided Nupur Sharma merely for quoting correctly a verse from an Islamic source, and claimed she was causing fissures in society. But the Supreme Court has not bothered with any suo moto comments on Stalin Jr or A Raja.
This is apartheid, a classic oppression of majority populations to benefit minorities.
Anand Ranganathan’s recent book goes into detail in this, and I am sure it is worth a read. An apartheid state is unsustainable and needs to be reformed.
The fact of the matter is that there are several religions intent on world conquest, Christianity, Islam and their modern-day variants Communism and Wokeism. All of them view Hindus as targets and as sacrificial lambs for their glory.
Unfortunately, this is not even new. Here’s a letter to the editor published in the Hindu newspaper, apparently in the 1940s.
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* It’s illegal. There is a constitutional right to worship. Even more so there is a right to equality to all citizens.
* It’s immoral and criminal. To call for genocide. This is not free speech. This is hate speech
* This is pure propaganda
* Demonizing the enemy has a long history
* Spaniards called aztecs cannibals and vice versa, but white people got to write the history books
* Yellow peril
* Nazis called jews vermin
* Hutus in rwanda called tutsis cockroaches, and then genocide them
* N s rajarams’s comment on how caldwell, naicker etc were attempting the same in tamil nadu
* History of the justice party, dmk etc is shameful: basically arms of conversion, not anti-religion, only anti-hindu
* Anti-hindu memes in the west: california bill, equality labs, audrey truschke, against vivek ramaswamy
* Progressively from hindutva to hinduism to sanatana dharma. escalation
* INDIAlliance has shown itself to be purely anti-hindu
* But questions for BJP too: why are hindu temples still managed by the state? Anand ranganathan maintains that hindus are not even second-class, they are eighth class, with far fewer rights than others.
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A version of this essay was published by news18.com at https://www.news18.com/opinion/opinion-what-a-difference-ten-years-make-india-since-2014-8559632.html
I wrote ten years ago on Rediff.com (‘The great Indian rope trick and other illusions of progress’ https://www.rediff.com/news/column/the-great-indian-rope-trick-and-other-illusions-of-progress/20130716.htm) about how the average Indian is satisfied with illusion, never mind real progress. That made India a Potemkin State, where form is everything and substance is immaterial.
It turns out that I was wrong: Indians do want actual progress. I might be pardoned for saying what I said then because the country was at the fag-end of the Lost Decade, 2004 to 2013, wherein things deteriorated steadily. Decline had been par for the course throughout the Nehruvian-Stalinist decades of dirigisme. Conversely, there has been noticeable change in 2014-2023.
Apart from mis-steps in economic management, the political environment was also dicey. There was the appalling spectacle of a constitutional coup, as I noted at the time (‘Four ways the Congress won power by Constitutional coups’ https://www.rediff.com/news/column/column-rajeev-srinivasan-4-ways-the-congress-won-power-through-constitutional-coups/20140107.htm): by colluding with the Communist Speaker in the cash-for-votes scam, the Congress clung on to power violating democratic norms.
We see the same recklessness today in the US (“Let’s jail the leading opposition candidate”) and in Germany (“One party is getting too popular, let’s ban it”). It does not bode well. The New York Times, on August 21, 2023 ran the striking headline, “Elections Are Bad for Democracy” before changing it to “The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way”. Yes, democracy is too important to leave to the people. Let us elites tell them what to think.
The most striking example of this uncaring State, the very nadir of its contempt for the man in the street, was the length of the chain anchoring the mug in the loo in railway compartments: just three inches too short, thus shattering the illusion that you could actually clean your bottom. A daunting prospect for any traveler, especially because of the overwhelming stink, and a world of difference from Japan’s shinkansen and their amazing high-tech loos.
Recently I traveled in several train compartments, including ancient Jan Shatabdi chair cars and newish Hamsafar sleeper coaches, although, alas, not in Vande Bharat coaches yet; but I was surprised at how much better the toilets were. The ‘bio toilet’ means human feces are not dumped on the tracks; they do not smell terrible, and, wonder of wonders, there is a hygiene hose/bidet that is actually long enough to do the deed.
And, perhaps redundantly, the chain for the mug has been lengthened. And there is water!
It is hard to explain to a non-Indian what a difference all this makes. I had a cousin who denied herself food and drink while traveling by train just so she could avoid the toilet. It is a sea-change when you are granted a little self-respect. I am reminded of the placard held by a man at a Martin Luther King rally: “I am a man”. Yes, the proverbial average Indian aam admi is a human who deserves consideration: not only Lutyens and Khan Market types.
I am sorry to talk about a cringe-making topic like toilets, but this is something earthy and immediately understandable; it makes the point that India is, 76 years after the imperialists left and brown sahebs took over, finally on the march. Indians are beginning to see that they can demand respect from their rulers, and get it. Dignity, that watchword of the butler Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant The Remains of the Day.
In a penetrating 1997 essay, “India shouldn’t have fantasies about the past, but face it” (https://www.indiatoday.in/india-today-insight/story/from-the-archives-1997-v-s-naipaul-india-shouldn-t-have-fantasies-about-the-past-but-face-it-1988599-2022-08-16) Sir V S Naipaul mentioned that those who have been oppressed and denigrated for centuries are now rising, and this rise will be messy. He was talking about those outside the charmed circle that ruled the country for long. It is also broader: the rise of the Other Backward Communities, that uncharming name for the majority of Indians, the bahujan.
Naipaul also said that the rulers will now of necessity be of the people, not overlords. It can be argued that for over a thousand years, Indians have been effectively ruled by a comprador ‘elite’, middlemen who did the dirty work on behalf of invaders or distant rulers. It is my suspicion that the zamindars and other local strongmen were largely from the upper or middle jatis, and it is only now that those from the bottom of the pyramid are finally getting a say in things.
No, this is not a jati-bashing exercise, and I may be extrapolating from my observations in Kerala, where a middle jati, Nairs, were the kulaks who lorded it over those below them in the hierarchy, such as OBC Ezhavas, SC Pulayas, and ST Mala-arayans. The latter are now rising, though not in full measure, yet. I think it’s similar in Tamil Nadu, too.
In the Soviet Union, Stalin liquidated the kulaks. In India, their eclipse has come about too late, though without violence. The usual woke Lutyens/Khan Market suspects were disappointed they couldn’t chortle about Chandrayaan-3 being yet another expensive failure a poor country could ill afford, echoing Brits upset that their alleged ‘aid’ was going to India (in reality, as per the UK Foreign Office, India politely declined any charity from them starting 2015; any money coming to India from the UK is foreign direct investment (FDI), or strictly in support of their geopolitical objectives, channeled via dubious NGOs or missionaries).
The ‘wokes’ also grumbled about ISRO engineers going to Tirupati and invoking the blessings of the Divine for their project. I am glad they got a munh thod jawab. There really is no dichotomy in Hindu thought between science and faith: science too requires faith and belief.
The ‘wokes’ have reason to be worried, not only by the picture-perfect moon landing, but also by Praggnaanandhaa, who almost unseated the reigning World Champion in chess; Neeraj Chopra, who won the World Athletic Championship in javelin to go with his Olympic gold; the 4x400 relay quartet with their heroics of almost defeating the Americans in the heats while setting an Asian record; and Vivek Ramaswamy, who is unabashedly Hindu and at the same time a patriotic American and a force to contend with in the Republican party in the US.
Even though they haven’t been defenestrated, except perhaps some unfortunate folks at Ashoka University, India’s Left are less and less relevant: relics of a failed ideology. They should count their lucky stars: in Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew liquidated them. And indeed, even in the US, the ‘woke’ capital of the world, their star is setting.
There is another reason I brought up toilets: the unseemly obsession that westerners have with them. I was delighted to see this cartoon on Twitter, and it is obviously a parody of the earlier one in the sadly overrated New York Times, below.
While the racist derision of the original cartoon, and the celebration of the be-jasmined and be-bindi’d women in Indian engineering are the obvious takeaways, I was intrigued by a detail: the white guy in the cartoon is dragging a shopping-cart full of toilet paper behind him! I am not sure why toilet paper is some kind of atavistic guilty pleasure for westerners.
Despite being purely climate-related (they could not afford to melt ice and snow just to wash their bottoms, or for that matter their hands, thus cutlery), toilet paper has become a cultural staple for them. You might remember the hoarding of toilet paper in the early days of covid! It’s time westerners abandoned killing trees, and went for the more healthy bidet-like health faucet. For that matter, the squat in Indian closets is apparently better than the sitting posture on a western ‘thunder-box’. Recently while traveling in the Czech Republic, I stayed in a (fancy) hotel that had a bidet: such a relief! May their tribe increase!
Of course, some things never change. This was demonstrated in two ways: the thinly-veiled envy from the British that manifested itself in their assertion that an India full of open defecation shouldn’t be spending on space research, and The Economist magazine in their recent obituary of Bindeswar Pathak repeatedly emphasizing caste discrimination and manual scavenging. These are vestiges of the past, and mostly due to the $10 trillion (or $45 trillion depending on whom you ask) that the Brits looted, impoverishing India. But then, who’s counting?
Oh, you want to talk about open defecation? Once-beautiful San Francisco is now the champion, while India has built large numbers of indoor toilets all over the country. See the ‘poop map’ of San Francisco here (https://mochimachine.org/wasteland/# ).
One thing that has definitely changed in the last ten years is the amount of Hindu-hatred expressed in the West, particularly America. The California caste Bill, Equality Labs, Audrey Truschke, and the latest, tech journo Kara Swisher’s racist attack on Vivek Ramaswamy, are all related to the fact that Hindus have quietly become one of the most economically successful (but politically powerless) groups in the US. It is really a back-handed compliment, happily cheered on by rogues from the “Chindu” stable or similar. Caste is the weapon.
Hindus tend to be defensive about caste. We shouldn’t be. Caste is really a white invention, from the Portuguese casta, intended to segregate mixed-race people based on how white they are, half, quarter, one-eighth, etc: thus mulatto, quadroon, octroon, etc. It is their cross to bear. There is an ocean of difference between this caste business and jatis, but I digress..
Besides, there are de facto castes in the US: the investment banker caste, the doctor caste, the lawyer caste, the management consultant caste, etc. They all go to the same tony prep schools, the same Ivy League colleges (legacy admissions mean you easily get into Harvard, if your parent(s) went to Harvard, regardless of your grades. Raj Chetty has published reams of data about this); they are endogamous; and they all miraculously end up at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey. An outsider can’t break in. These castes are also Lindy (ask Nassim Taleb).
Perhaps, taking a cue from other groups that have prospered, Hindus (and Indian Americans in general) are becoming ‘white’, like others have before them. Irish, Italians, Jews, Japanese, Koreans, Chinese: there is a long list. ‘Whiteness’ is a construct. I was flabbergasted decades ago when a well-meaning white guy said, “You guys are almost white”. I stuttered: “But, but… we are brown!”.
If you have money, you pretty much become white. I give it another ten years. With India’s GDP at $10 trillion, and more Hindu-Americans creating unicorns, I bet by 2034 Hindus will be ‘white’. Maybe Vivek is the first white Hindu. I am not making a value judgment, merely making a prediction. You heard it here first.
1800 words, Aug 29, 2023, updated Sep 10, 2023
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-paris-is-burning-why-12837712.html
I had the disconcerting experience of being on the ground in Paris while the current riots raged. Oddly enough, on my previous visit, in April 2019, I arrived the night the Notre Dame cathedral caught fire, and then was in town during the Yellow Vest riots against fuel taxes. In both cases, my plans were affected: in the current case I stirred out of my hotel room near the Arc de Triomphe with trepidation, worried as I was by TV images of random violence and especially arson.
I had been to Paris for several years in a row (until covid) for an annual conference on innovation, so I have a slight familiarity with the city, and it remains one of the most charming cities in the world. Architecturally appealing, with world-class museums (I did my usual homage to the Louvre, the impressionist Musee d’Orsay and the Musee Guimet of Asian art), lovely boulevards, the peerless Eiffel Tower, the unhurried meals in sidewalk cafes: the very picture of the good life.
Then there is the dark side of things.
The proximate cause of the troubles was the shooting death of a 17 year old youth of Algerian heritage, possibly the result of excessive force by the police. But this is just the spark. As in other countries with restless minority populations (e.g. the US with periodic riots after police shoot yet another black man, as in Los Angeles burning after the death of Rodney King), there are many other resentments that fan the fire. It would be easy to surmise that racism and the reaction thereto are the main factors in action.
But I think there is another, possibly preponderant cause: demographic shift. France is getting less white, more black and Arab, and more Muslim. Coupled with an ever-restive leftist streak that has been evident for long (remember the student riots in May 1968 and the always volatile Left Bank?), today we have a left-migrant nexus of sorts that magnifies any issue and takes to the streets.
There are large numbers of migrants, including those who came from the colonies and more recently refugees fleeing terror and chaos in Syria, Afghanistan etc. One would think that they would generally be grateful to Europe for taking them in, but radicalization is literally visible on the streets: the older generation is more secular, but their sons and especially their daughters-in-law are more observant, with beards, hijabs and other signs of religiosity. They are influenced by fiery preachers who call for jihad.
It is now much easier to marshal ‘flashmobs’ via social media. In fact, France has just had to turn off the Internet to prevent further provocation and nastiness. Let us note that this was not trumpeted by Deep State journalists as a sign of autocracy, although that is exactly what they say when India has to turn off the Internet in Kashmir.
There were statements made by some of the rioters (I’m not sure if it is just bravado or whether they seriously mean it) that they intend to take over Europe through the power of their numbers, as they are noticeably more fertile than native whites. Eurabia is an inevitable reality, they believe. This, naturally, does not sit well with the locals. They will probably begin to curtail migration, as some Scandinavian countries have begun to do.
Perhaps there is also a crisis in governance, which was the opinion of an old friend, whom I met for drinks at the landmark Publicis Drugstore on the Champs Elysees. She was unhappy about the mayor and other politicians whom she blamed for the poor state of general administration. (I just read that a suburban mayor’s home was attacked, and his wife injured). Although my friend didn’t talk about him, Emmanuel Macron is not universally popular either; even senior citizens appear to be upset with him.
She also mentioned that the covid lockdowns had had a hugely disruptive, and lingering, effect, as many people lost their jobs, many moved out of Paris, and have had their prospects diminished. France’s place in the world is also diminishing: it is now mostly a purveyor of luxury goods (fittingly, the head of LVMH is now the richest person in the world), and it was roundly humiliated by the US in the AUKUS affair, even though it is still a major arms supplier.
Maybe there is a certain angst in the air. Maybe that is the root cause, or at least a root cause.
I met a Pondicherry-origin man working in the transit hotel near the airport where I spent my last night in Paris, not wanting to risk riots, arson and barricades on the way from the city to Charles de Gaulle. He was generally negative, warning me about crime ranging from pickpocketing to muggings and especially the riots. He felt that his life as an immigrant (he has been there for many years) has become worse, and he felt he could be targeted by both Arabs and whites based on his Indian looks and the certainty that he was harmless and would not retaliate.
I only personally witnessed a boisterous crowd shouting slogans that I couldn’t understand, and no violence or arson (thankfully), but there was the constant wail of police sirens in the background, and what sounded like shots in the middle distance. Sadly, the largest library in France was set on fire. Thousands of vehicles were destroyed, and hundreds of houses looted and burned. In the end, I am told residents responded with vigilante squads fending off the unruly mobs.
I also spoke to the proverbial taxi driver (a Moroccan-Frenchman), following in the footsteps of famous economists and journalists. He tried to be circumspect, and he didn’t seem to be a religious person (there were no accoutrements in his car), but he told me about hard times. He was running an illegal taxi service, and he overcharged me 10 Euros since (he claimed) he didn’t have enough change.
He spoke about unemployment and discrimination, and how inflation was hurting his living standards. I have in the past found French Arabs not very hostile to Indians (as we don’t threaten their livelihoods), and this man wasn’t either.
The same issue of economic problems was echoed by a Malayali manning a souvenir shop. He had arrived as a student, stayed on for a few years, and now was facing problems in bringing his family over from India. Incidentally, a lot of the souvenir stalls near Sacre Coeur, the Louvre and elsewhere are staffed or owned by Indian-origin people: I met one from Gujarat, another from Mauritius.
The number of Indians I saw around Paris has gone up from prior visits: both tourists and residents. There still are far more East Asians (in my hotel there were Koreans and Singaporeans) around. I met a young woman from Kanyakumari who was leading a tour group on the Eiffel Tower. She was optimistic: she was doing her MBA, working part-time, and she has an import-export startup in India that she will be returning to.
My chance encounters with these people illustrate the point about European decline. France has a nice little niche in luxury goods, but I suspect their buyers are increasingly from newly-affluent Asia. The departure area at CDG airport Terminal 1 is a veritable secular cathedral, with chandeliers and luxurious seats, surrounded by glitzy and expensive Dior, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Hermes, Cartier, etc. shops tempting the departing traveler.
But decline in the former colonial powers (most evident in Britain, which also shot itself in the foot with Brexit) is a fact. In a way it is poetic justice: Paris is full of evident loot from elsewhere (the Egyptian obelisk from Luxor, the Cambodian sculptures from the Bayon and Angkor Wat) and France clearly was enriched by exploitation of the colonies.
But their core industrial strength has vanished (China continues to rape and pillage their IPR), along with their position in the global GDP standings. India has overtaken France and Britain, and will soon overtake Germany. Europe is now less of a factor in the world than it has been since the Middle Ages. Asia is rising again.
It’s a powerful cocktail: inevitable cyclical decline, memories of imperial grandeur, the determined Islamist assault, and general anti-government feelings going way back to the French Revolution. Surely, the crackdown by some 50,000 police and if necessary, the army, will control the riots, but one day the rioters may win. Predictably, all of Europe is now shifting right-wards: Italy, Finland, Greece, possibly Spain. Hard times beget hard men.
1450 words, Jul 3, 2023
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-permanent-interests-not-permanent-friends-drive-foreign-policy-12814872.html
The optics for PM Narendra Modi’s visit to the US were good. There was a surprisingly positive reception to his speech to the joint houses of the US Parliament (known as the US Congress, not to be confused with the Indian political party with its congenital allergy to Modi). I read that the PM gave a bravura performance, and that he was interrupted by several standing ovations.
The rest of the trip also got generally good reviews. It would be wonderful if my two favorite nations were to become good friends. I lived most of my youth in the US, and I love the country. By ancestry and culture, of course my roots are Indian.
But any such rapport will not come about if the usual suspects can help it. I was not really surprised by the news that former President Barak Obama was scathing about India and Modi. I have not been a fan of Obama’s from day one: something about him made my antennae go up. And then I heard that he had gone to Pakistan in his youth, at a stage in life when most young Americans go to India to find themselves. I guess Obama had already found himself.
Then there was Fareed Zakaria who echoed the libel that India was massacring Muslims. He knows well enough that this is not true. If anything, Indian Muslims are more privileged than others. And Zakaria and his father are among the most privileged, a super-elite caste of “Anglo-Mughalais” (my friend Bapa Rao’s evocative term) who take advantage of everything India has to offer, in the name of the poorer castes of Muslims whom they find it convenient to keep poor and angry.
And then there was Sabrina Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American journalist who is part of the Biden administration, whose provocative question to the PM raised hackles.
The meme that is quietly being propagated by all of them is that India is on the verge of genocide of its Muslim residents. This is simply not true: just as they are currently doing in France, Muslims riot at the drop of a hat in India. This is hardly a dara hua population. Obama’s direct hint about a Partition 2.0 is a good summary of the standard Deep State perspective on India: keep it down, poor, and preferably broken: Hindus are not allowed to rise.
Less sinister was some guy in Foreign Affairs opining that the US and India do not share ‘values’ but only ‘interests’. Maybe, but that should not stop them from becoming friends. That is realpolitik: the enlightened pursuit of self-interest. Nations, in a Chanakyan way, can and should pursue their own long-term and short-term interests. I once invoked Chanakya’s ‘Far Emperor’: you cultivate the distant emperor to wage war against the neighbor, who, sadly, will sooner or later become your foe. That’s a good model for India. A benign US can be the Far Emperor when the nearby power threatens.
As for the US, with a rampaging China threatening to overturn the entire US-dominated international order, it is good to have friends who can keep China occupied in its neighborhood: to put it crudely, India is the only country to have recently killed Chinese troops, and stared them down in a tense stand-off.
And values. I have to believe that the guiding values of the US are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. So far as I can tell, this is exactly what India is attempting to do for its citizens and this is precisely what the much-maligned (by the US Deep State) Modi is trying to do. How much more congruent can your values get?
But I must acknowledge that there is a definite gulf between Abrahamic values and Dharmic values.
The ‘religions of the desert’, that is, Abrahamisms including the Christian, Islamic and Communist faiths, have as a central tenet world conquest. I classify Abrahamisms as follows:
* Paleo-semitic: Zoroastrianism, Judaism
* Meso-semitic: Christianity, Islam
* Neo-semitic: Communism, Fascism, Nehruism, Ambedkarism, Dravidianism, and so on
The common thread is that these are prone to promote competition and zero-sum games. This is a consequence of the fact that the Middle East, where these ideologies germinated (though they have obviously managed to capture much territory elsewhere) is mostly a fearsome desert. If you do not follow a few simple rules (‘Commandments’) you will perish: for instance, “carry water”, “cover yourself up against the sun and sand”, “kill or be killed”, “your life here and now may suck, but there’s a heaven after you die and if you want to get there, do the following”.
The Dharmic worldview, being that of the ‘religions of the forest’, is fundamentally different. This is because the Asian forest, while it can be dangerous, is benign. There are fruits to forage for, and water to drink. Your basic survival is not in such jeopardy, and so you can afford to be a little flexible. Of course there are rules like “look out for snakes”, and “climb a tree to escape predators”, but basically life is easier, and so you develop an attitude of “live and let live”.
I have recently been traveling in Europe, and spent some time in the Louvre Museum. The items on display there are a graphic reminder of these differences: the galleries showing Greek, Roman, Persian and Mediterranean art (pre-Abrahamic) are radically different from medieval (Abrahamic) art from later times. Yes, there is a difference ever since meso-Semitism became the European standard.
The biologist Richard Dawkins is a good example of the fact that Abrahamic values are the norm for anyone in the West, even if they reject Abrahamic religions, and claim to be atheists, although one could easily argue that atheism is yet another Abrahamism. He has admitted to being culturally Abrahamic, and he is both ignorant and arrogant regarding Dharmic systems: he doesn’t understand them, and fits them into a Procrustean Abrahamic mold. The same is true of Noam Chomsky.
I do believe that the US and India do not and couldn’t possibly share all their values: so that is a futile argument at best. Yet they can and do share interests, mostly the containment of China. Values at a grassroots level are not all that different in practice. Individual Americans are among the nicest, friendliest, most gregarious and decent people anywhere. And so are Indians.
It is possible to write reams about Chinese strategic brilliance and Sun Tzu and all that, but the fact remains that while it has thrived under centralized imperial rule, it has also regularly faced catastrophic collapse and periods of chaos. But there is no gainsaying the fact that for the last thirty years or so, China has outplayed the US, to the extent that the CEO of a big defense company (Raytheon if I remember right) says it is impossible to decouple from thousands of Chinese suppliers.
When I first went to the US, in the late 1970s, things generally looked good there, even though there was a period of high inflation. The Cold War came to an end soon thereafter (The Soviets were outmaneuvered) and Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History seemed possible: Western (that is, a special form of Abrahamic) values had won. Period.
Hubris is usually followed by Nemesis. The needs of the war industry took center stage, and money that could and should have been spent on the welfare of Americans was lavished on strange ‘projects’ everywhere, such as Iraq, and much later, Afghanistan. The latter was justifiable based on 9/11, but the way it was conducted and (in particular) terminated was atrocious. And now, Ukraine.
Meanwhile, China has deeply infiltrated the US through its agents; its unwitting fifth columnists now include Wall Street bankers and captains of industry. Then there are these suspicious little joint ventures, for instance, it now looks increasingly possible that the Covid virus was dreamt up by some billionaires, and executed as a biowarfare project by senior US government officials. It just got a little out of hand. 10-20 million dead, mostly in mRNA-vaccinated rich countries. Oops.
So there are many players in the US (and I am not going to get into the godawful wokeness issue or the dubious and dangerous anti-democratic games going on) who are interested in, or paid to, create a narrative that puts India down and keeps it down. This includes the Indian-origin activists and journalists who are astroturfed with ISI money and Chinese money, and when they attack Modi, it is perfectly clear that the target is really India and Hindus.
Given the power of these lobbies, the US will get close to India if and only if it has no other choice. Someone writing in the WSJ asked if the US needs India. My belief is that there is mutual benefit. India is no longer the country that some Americans remember: waiting for PL-480 grain to avoid mass starvation. Economics matters, and matters greatly. As and when India becomes a major consumer of all sorts of goods and services for its domestic market, the US will benefit.
Is India there yet? No. Can it get there? Yes, if all goes well. But things can easily go south. There are dangerous elements in India with their rent-a-riot crowds and their ‘500 rupees and biriyani for your vote’. The painful and hard-won infrastructure improvement and quality of life improvement can disappear virtually overnight.
India’s interests include American help in continuing to grow, and this may be in the form of funding and R&D, although quite frankly this could just as well come from Japan. It includes a modus vivendi with China, which is the original intent of the Quad as visualized by that visionary statesman Abe Shinzo: an armed truce, as it were. Red lines. Guardrails. And it wants the ‘rules-based, liberal, international order’ to be amended to include 1.4 billion Indians.
None of this sounds unreasonable. The question is, how much of this coincides with America’s interests. Values are nice, and yes, it would be good if they coincide. But if not, common interests are perfectly good bases for co-existence.
1200 words, 23 June 2023, 1700 words updated 1 July 1, 2023
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A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-mr-modi-goes-to-washington-deja-vu-all-over-again-12750892.html
Considering that India and the US are my two favorite countries, it is odd that I get nervous whenever there is a summit between the two. I am reminded inevitably of the Frank Capra film “Mr Smith goes to Washington” (1939), where James Stewart plays Mr Smith, a naive idealist, who goes to the corrupt company town Washington DC and is bullied and humiliated. In the end (this being fiction) Mr Smith wins a famous victory for democracy and the power of the people.
In real life, things are different. Mr Modi is not naive, and he is a pragmatist (though there is a wee bit of an idealist in him), and he is quite aware of the Deep State and its regime-change agendas (e.g. they just did one in Brazil, defenestrating Bolsonaro, although it didn’t quite work with Hungary’s Orban). Besides, I am sure that the PM remembers the same Democrats giving him the dubious distinction of being the only person ever denied a visa on the grounds of “severe violation of religious freedom”, purportedly for the Gujarat riots in 2002. Yes, along the same lines as the absurd USCIRF.
When Democrats are in power, things simply don’t seem to go well for Indo-US relations. There are many reasons: one is that Democrats on average seem to prefer autocrats and uniformed caudillos because hey, they get things done; another is that many are Atlanticists, and quite a few are of Eastern European origin (eg Brzezinski, Albright, Nuland, Blinken) with scant regard for Indo-Pacific issues; a third is that they tend to be woke (trans-gender bathrooms, yeah!).
The Clinton Administration and especially the Obama Administration were unpleasant to India, in keeping with the above tendencies Democrats exhibit. Manmohan Singh was, with much hoopla, given the “first state dinner” by Obama, which so far as I can tell meant nothing whatsoever. It was an empty gesture.
In fact, I have been underwhelmed by various US shows of bonhomie. I panned the Obama state visit in 2010. To be honest, I have not been an admirer of Obama from day one, and the current Biden Administration seems to be, for all practical purposes, Obama 3.0: same ruinous economic and foreign policies, mostly the same tired faces, the same wokeness.
Even though I am Republican-leaning, I was not all that impressed by Narendra Modi’s interaction with Trump in 2017 either. Certainly, Trump was a lot better than the Democrats, but then I expected Trump to look out, correctly, for US interests, rather than do anything for India, even though Republicans understand the China threat better.
Earlier, I thought the entire full-court-press and hard-sell on the 2008 ‘nuclear deal’ simply indicated that it was a good deal for the US, and not so good for India. In the event, India’s nuclear power production capacity did not go up dramatically, India became a much bigger buyer of US military hardware, and there were surely (non-public) limitations placed on India’s nuclear weapons programs.
I guess I suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations. I think this is a selling job on the part of the Americans, and that ill-prepared Indians will be taken in by flattery. Therefore I continue to be skeptical about the real value of the current tour by Modi to meet Biden, and have a ‘state dinner’ with him. In fact, I do hope Modi will take his own chef with him. Let’s be careful remembering (God forbid) what happened to Lal Bahadur Shastri.
I get particularly suspicious when The Economist magazine, which is the voice of the Deep State, starts waxing eloquent about something. Apart from the fact that they are generally wrong about all their geopolitical forecasts, being unvarnished imperialists, I am reminded of Kissinger’s dictum: “It is dangerous to be America’s enemy, but fatal to be America’s friend”.
I tried to get Microsoft Bing and DALL-E to get me an AI-generated image of the great mans’ quote, but I was warned sternly that such a query was “against content rules” (whatever they are) and that I would be kicked off the platform! So I am satisfying myself with this Economist cover story, which apparently is a parody of some Netflix show.
Prospects are actually worse for Indo-American rapport today than they have been for years, although it should be the opposite, given rampaging China. The principal reason is Democrat antipathy: for instance Biden’s staff explicitly hurt India in the past with the so-called Biden Amendment that set India’s space program back by 19 years by pressing the Russians to cancel the transfer of cryogenic engines, as seen in the brilliant “Rocketry: the Nambi Effect”.
On top of this, the US has hurt itself in the last few years through disastrous policies, allowing others to gain power in relative terms. So when Modi goes to Washington, it would be appropriate to revisit the old story about the emperor, the vassal king and his court bard, who wrote a new poem extolling the emperor as “the full moon”, and the king as “the new moon”.
Upon being berated by the king for diminishing him, the bard explained: “The full moon is waning, and the new moon is waxing.” This mollified the king, presumably saving the bard from having his head separated from his body.
India is on a trajectory to achieve economic (and military) power, but then it may or may not be in the US’s interests to accommodate India. The on-again, off-again US approach to the Quad (eg the AUKUS diversion) signals that the US is not serious about India’s concerns regarding China’s hegemonic ambitions. Not only US politicians, but the steady stream of Wall Street and business honchos making a beeline for China suggests that even for the money folks, despite calls for ‘de-coupling’ or ‘de-risking’, China is very much a factor in their future plans.
The US has made several strategic, even existential, blunders in the recent past, and again I think the Democrats are mostly to blame:
* The US actively collaborated in the rise of China by allowing it to be a principal manufacturing partner. People such as Henry Kissinger and several POTUSes wittingly or unwittingly helped in a process where China effectively de-industrialized the US. As the realist foreign policy analyst John Mearsheimer suggests, this may be the worst example ever of a major power paving the way for its own eclipse.
* The unnecessary Ukraine war, with the singular goal of humiliating and possibly balkanizing Russia, has already had disastrous consequences for Western Europe. Russia is a demographically declining power, and it will eventually fade away on its own; wasting enormous amounts of money and effort on ‘punishing’ it is a folly, as was the peremptory, headlong abandonment of Afghanistan to the Taliban. By pushing Russia into China’s dhritharashtra embrace, the Ukraine war is counterproductive strategically.
* The emerging facts about the Covid pandemic suggest that Anthony Fauci and others were working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology on ‘gain-of-function’, in direct contravention of US law. In addition, the poorly handled fiscal and monetary policies in relation to the pandemic have imposed pain, including high inflation, on the US.
* The awful culture wars and the focus on gender issues, diversity, equity, climate change and other divisive issues have been tearing the US apart since Obama’s time. Objectively speaking, some of these are manufactured issues. In addition, there is clear deterioration in the system, where now we have the unedifying spectacle of an ex-President indicted on mishandling classified documents, and the sitting President is accused of the same, as well as of relatives doing influence peddling.
None of this is a good look. The US is in trouble. Which it pains me to say, because I think the ideals of the ‘City on a hill’ that animate the spirit of the US Constitution still resonate after all these years. It is hard to think that the US is being overtaken by an authoritarian China.
Anyway, I think the general idea from the Biden Administration’s point of view is to get India into its orbit as a vassal, just like most of Western Europe, Japan, Australia, etc. The nastiness at the time India stoutly refused to toe the US/NATO line on Ukraine is a signal about this. People like the Portuguese Bruno Macaes and Duleep Singh, the architect of the Russia sanctions, chided India severely; the official US stance was that India somehow betrayed their trust. They couldn’t accept that India has no dog in this very European/Western fight.
I suspect a big part of the backroom negotiations on the PM’s trip will be to get India to toe the line on Ukraine. There will be various sticks and carrots dangled, such as technology transfers (which is actually an oxymoron, as nobody in their right mind transfers technology; the only way it happens is if you steal it, like China does). Then there is the GE fighter aircraft engine under discussion, and vague talk about quantum computing and other exotic stuff.
There will be more efforts to wean India away from Russian arms imports, and to sell lots of US hardware. There are expensive drones being discussed. An expert told me that if these are Reaper-class Sea Guardians, they may be a good buy, as they can be paired with the submarine hunter-killer surveillance craft, the P8i Poseidon, to help patrol the Indian Ocean.
All in all, the prospects for a mutually beneficial outcome seem bleak. Let us just hope that the Indians don’t come back with a whole lot of lemons, having been bamboozled. Again.
1473 words, June 15th 2023, updated June 17th
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com -
A version of this essay has been published by Open Magazine at https://openthemagazine.com/essays/the-new-knowledge-war/
Generative AI, as exemplified by chatGPT from Microsoft/OpenAI and Bard from Google, is probably the hottest new technology of 2023. Its ability has mesmerised consumers to provide answers to all sorts of questions, as well as to create readable text or poetry and images with universal appeal.
These generative AI products purport to model the human brain (‘neural networks') and are ‘trained’ on large amounts of text and images from the Internet. Large Language Models or ‘LLMs’ are the technical term for the tools underlying generative AI. They use probabilistic statistical models to predict words in a sequence or generate images based on user input. For most practical purposes, this works fine. However, in an earlier column in Open Magazine, “Artificial Intelligence is like Allopathy”, we pointed out that in both cases, statistical correlation is being treated by users as though it were causation. In other words, just because two things happened together, you can’t assume one caused the other. This flaw can lead to completely wrong or misleading results in some cases: the so-called ‘AI hallucination’.
To test our hypothesis, we asked chatGPT to summarise that column. It substantially covered most points, but surprisingly, though, it completely ignored the term ‘Ayurveda', although we had used it several times in the text to highlight ‘theory of disease’. This is thought-provoking, because it implies that in the vast corpus of data that chatGPT trained on, there is nothing about Ayurveda.
The erasure of Indic knowledge
Epistemology is the study of knowledge itself: how we acquire it, and the relationship between knowledge and truth. There is a persistent concern that Indic knowledge systems are severely under-represented or mis-represented in epistemology in the Anglosphere. Indian intellectual property is ‘digested’, to use Rajiv Malhotra’s evocative term.
For that matter, India does not receive credit for innovations such as Indian numerals (misnamed Arabic numerals), vaccination (attributed to the British, though there is evidence of prior knowledge among Bengali vaidyas), or the infinite series for mathematical functions such as pi or sine (ascribed to Europeans, though Madhava of Sangamagrama discovered them centuries earlier).
The West (notably, the US) casually captures and repackages it even today. Meditation is rebranded as ‘mindfulness’, and the Huberman Lab at Stanford calls Pranayama ‘cyclic sighing’. A few years ago, the attempts of the US to patent basmati rice and turmeric were foiled by the provision of ‘prior art’, such as the Hortus Malabaricus, written in 1676 about the medicinal plants of the Western Ghats.
Judging by current trends, Wikipedia, and presumably Google, LinkedIn, and other text repositories, are not only bereft of Indian knowledge, but also full of anti-Indian and specifically anti-Hindu disinformation. Any generative AI relying on this ‘poisoned’ 'knowledge base' will, predictably, produce grossly inaccurate output.
This has potentially severe consequences: considering that Sanskrit, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali (and non-Latin scripts) etc. are underrepresented on the Internet, generative AI models will not learn or generate text from these languages. For all intents and purposes, Indic knowledge will disappear from the discourse. These issues will exacerbate the bias against non-English speakers, who will not think about their identity or culture, reducing diversity and killing innovation.
More general problems with epistemology: bias, data poisoning and AI hallucinations
Generative AI models are trained on massive datasets of text and code. This means they are susceptible to inherent biases. A case in point: if a dataset is biased against non-white females, then the generative AI model will be more likely to generate text that is also biased against non-white women. Additionally, malicious actors can poison generative AI models by injecting false or misleading data into the training dataset.
For example, a coordinated effort to introduce anti-India biases into Wikipedia articles (in fact this is the case today) will produce output that is notably biased. An example of this is a query about Indian democracy to Google Bard: it produced a result that suggested this is a Potemkin construct (i.e., one that is merely a facade); Hindu nationalism and tight control of the media “which has become increasingly partisan and subservient to the government” were highlighted as concerns. This is straight from ‘toolkits', which have poisoned the dataset and are helped, in part, by US hegemonic economic dominance.
More subtly, generative AI models are biased towards Western norms and values (or have a US-centric point of view). For example, the Body Mass Index (BMI), a measure of body fat, has been used in Western countries to determine obesity, but is a poor measure for the Indian population, as we tend to have a higher percentage of body fat than our Western counterparts.
An illustration of AI hallucination came to the fore from an India Today story entitled "Lawyer faces problems after using ChatGPT for research. AI tool comes up with fake cases that never existed." It reported how a lawyer who used ChatGPT-generated precedents had his case dismissed because the court found the references were fabricated by AI. Similar risks in the medical field for patient treatment will be exacerbated if algorithms are trained on non-curated datasets.
While these technologies promise access to communication, language itself becomes a barrier. For instance, due to the dominant prevalence of English literature, a multilingual model might link the word dove with peace, but the Basque word for dove (‘uso’) is used as a slur. Many researchers have encountered the limitations of these LLMs, for other languages like Spanish or Japanese. ChatGPT struggles to mix languages fluently in the same utterance, such as English and Tamil, despite claims of 'superhuman' performance.
The death of Intellectual Property Rights
Intellectual property rights are a common concern. Already, generative AIs can produce exact copies (tone and tenor) of creative works by certain authors (for example, J K Rowling's Harry Potter series). This is also true of works of art. Two things are happening in the background: any copyright inherent in these works has been lost, and creators will cease to create original works for lack of incentives (at least according to current intellectual property theory).
A recent Japanese decision to ignore copyrights in datasets used for AI training (from the blog technomancers.ai, “Japan Goes All In: Copyright Doesn't Apply to AI Training”) is surprisingly bold for that nation, which moves cautiously by consensus. The new Japanese law allows AI to use any data “regardless of whether it is for non-profit or commercial purposes, whether it is an act other than reproduction, or whether it is content obtained from illegal sites or otherwise.” Other governments will probably follow suit. This is a land-grab or a gold rush: India cannot afford to sit on the sidelines.
India has dithered on a strict Data Protection Bill, which would mandate Indian data to be held locally; indirectly, it would stem the cavalier capture and use of Indian copyright. The Implications are chilling; in the absence of economic incentives, nobody will bother to create new works of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, music, film, or art. New fiction and art produced by generative AI will be Big Brother-like. All that we would be left with as a civilisation will be increasingly perfect copies of extant works: Perfect but soulless. The end of creativity may mean the end of human civilisation.
With AIs doing ‘creation’, will people even bother? Maybe individual acts of creation, but then they still need the distribution channels so that they reach the public. In the past in India, kings or temples supported creative geniuses while they laboured over their manuscripts, and perhaps this will be the solution: State sponsorship for creators.
Indian Large Language Models: too few yet, while others are moving ahead
Diverse datasets will reduce bias and ensure equitable Indic representation to address the concerns about generative AI. Another way is to use more rigorous training methods to reduce the risk of data poisoning and AI hallucinations.
Progressive policy formulations, without hampering technological developments, are needed for safe and responsible use to govern the use of LLM's across disciplines, while addressing issues of copyright infringement and epistemological biases. Of course, there is the question of creating ‘guardrails': some experts call for a moratorium, or strict controls, on the growth of generative AI systems.
We must be alive to its geopolitical connotations, as well. The Chinese approach to comprehensive data-collection is what cardiologists refer to as a ‘coronary steal phenomenon’: one segment of an already well-perfused heart ‘steals’ from another segment to its detriment. The Chinese, for lack of better word, plunder (and leech) data while actively denying market access to foreign companies.
Google attempted to stay on in China with Project Dragonfly, while Amazon, Meta, Twitter were forced to exit the market. Meanwhile, ByteDance, owner of TikTok, is trying to obscure its CCP ties by moving to a 'neutral jurisdiction' in Singapore, while siphoning off huge amounts of user data from Europe and the US (and wherever else it operates) for behavioural targeting and capturing personal level data, including from children and young adults. The societal implications of the mental health 'epidemic' (depression, low self-esteem, and suicide) remain profound and seem like a reversal of the Opium Wars the West had unleashed on China.
India can avoid Chinese exclusivism by keeping open access to data flows while insisting on data localisation. The Chinese have upped the ante. Reuters reported that “Chinese organisations have launched 79 AI large language models since 2020”, citing a report from their Ministry of Science and Technology. Many universities, especially in Southeast Asia, are creating new data sets to address the spoken dialects.
West Asia, possibly realizing the limitations of “peak-oil”, have thrown their hat in the ring. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) claims to have created the world’s “first capable, commercially viable open-source general-purpose LLM, which beats all Big Tech LLMs”. According to the UAE's Technology Innovation Institute, the Falcon 40B is not only royalty free, but also outperforms “Meta's LLaMA and Stability AI's StableLM”.
This suggests that different countries recognise the importance of investing resources to create software platforms and ecosystems for technological dominance. This is a matter of national security and industrial policy.
“We have no moat” changes everything: welcome to tiny LLMs
Chiranjivi from IIT Bombay, IndiaBERT from IIT Delhi and Tarang from IIT Madras are a few LLMs from India. India needs to get its act together to bring out many more LLMs: these can focus on, and be trained on, specialised datasets representing specific domains, for instance, that can avoid data poisoning. The Ministries concerned should provide support, guidance, and funding.
The obstacle has been the immense hardware and training requirements: GPT-3, the earlier generation LLM, required 16,384 Nvidia chips at a cost of over $100 million. Furthermore, it took almost a year to train the model with 500 billion words, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. There was a natural assumption: the larger the data set, the better the result with ‘emergent’ intelligence. This sheer scale of investments was considered beyond Indian purview.
A remarkable breakthrough was revealed in a leaked internal Google memo, timed with Bard's release, titled "We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI," a veritable bombshell. It spoke about Meta’s open sourcing its algorithmic platform, LLaMA, and implications for generative AI research. Although there is no expert consensus, the evidence suggests smaller datasets can produce results almost as good as the large datasets.
This caused a flutter among the cognoscenti. Despite Meta releasing its crown jewels for a wider audience (developers), there was an uptick in its stock value, despite failures in its multiple pivots beyond social media.
To understand this better, Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘godfather’ of deep learning, explains in detail: All large language model (LLM) copies can learn separately, but share their knowledge instantly. That’s how chatbots know more than an average person. The performance trajectory of different LLM’s has skyrocketed; for example, consider this:
Using LLaMa as a base, researchers were able to quickly (in weeks) and cheaply (a few $100) produce Alpaca and Vicuna that, despite having fewer parameters, compete well with Google’s and openAI's models. The graph shows that the answers from their chatbots are comparable in quality (per GPT-4). A fine-tuning technique called LoRA (Low Rank Adoption) is the secret behind this advance.
This abruptly levels the playing field. Open-source models can be quickly scaled and run on even laptops and phones! Hardware is no longer a constraint. Let a thousand Indian LLMs bloom!
The way forward
Given the astonishing amounts being invested by venture capitalists and governments in generative AI, there will be an explosion in startup activity. There are already a few in India, such as Gan, Kroopai, Peppertype.ai, Rephrase.ai, TrueFoundry, and Cube. Still, TechCrunch quoted Sanford Bernstein analysts who painted a gloomy picture: “While there are over 1500 AI-based startups in India with over $4 billion of funding, India is still losing the AI innovation battle”.
Without exaggeration, it can be argued that this is an existential threat for India, and needs to be addressed on a war-footing. The AIforBharat initiative at IIT Madras is a start, but much more is needed. A sharply focused set of policies and regulations needs to be implemented by the government immediately that will both prevent the plunder of our intellectual property and data, and also encourage the creation of large numbers of models that make good use of Indian ingenuity and Indic knowledge.
2245 words, 4 June 2023
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com -
A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-no-the-finance-mandarins-dont-always-screw-up-they-only-do-it-in-petty-ways-12678122.html
The Twitterverse and the media in general have been brutal on India’s babu-log for several recent missteps. These, many fear, revive the ghosts of the late lamented License Raj: for instance the imposition of 20% Tax Collected at Source for overseas credit card transactions, the poorly-managed withdrawal of 2000-rupee notes, or the angel tax on domestic investments in startups (but not on investments from 21 specified countries).
But let’s be honest and give them credit where it’s due: they shepherded India through the pandemic leaving the economy in pretty decent shape compared to the rest of the world. Even more importantly, the general handling of the economy has gone so well (of course thanks also to other tailwinds like the infrastructure push and the manufacturing thrust) that there is a genuine feeling among both locals and foreigners that India’s time in the sun is finally here.
This is no mean achievement, especially given the withering information warfare waged by the Deepstate. India’s GDP grew in FY 2022-23 at 7.2%, pretty much the highest rate for any large economy, exceeding estimates even by the RBI. An optimistic report from Morgan Stanley, "How India Has Transformed in Less than a Decade" cites several reasons for such optimism: government reforms, demography, technology, strong economic fundamentals.
“India is broken”, it ain’t. And let’s not go with services alone, Raghuram Rajan!
And then the babus go and screw up on these relatively minor things, making everybody look bad!
This is like I have always said, Indians thrive on complexity. We can do the Kumbh Mela in fine style (kudos to the much-maligned babus), but we can’t queue up for an elevator to save our lives. Or desist from driving like maniacs, honking like mad and darting all over the place. Too simple, I guess.
There are also habitual naysayers (some surely beholden to the Nehruvian Stalinist ecosystem or on the Deepstate/Soros payroll) who simply cannot believe that things are finally beginning to look up in and for India. There are those who are perennially on pet hobby-horses (one who gets all his wisdom from taxi-drivers, and another who thinks low-quality service jobs that add no lasting value are manna from heaven). Others are periodically astroturfed like mushrooms after rains, to mix American and Malayalam metaphors recklessly.
What they fail to see (intentionally) is that the glass is half-full. Yes, there are major problems: India’s education system is going from bad to worse; corruption is still a menace; the public sector continues to be an albatross around India’s neck; the endless election cycle means that it is hard to think long-term (both for babus and for politicians); populist giveaways and special interest lobbies bankrupt the exchequer; the judicial system is in bad shape; and so on.
On the other hand, there is proof of progress. Undeniable proof. Once the dirigiste state was partly dismantled under duress by Narasimha Rao, things improved notably, as the animal spirits of Indian entrepreneurs and traders apparently had a field day. Under Narendra Modi India’s steady recent growth has been in nice contrast with tepid growth elsewhere.
But the more intriguing tale is about poverty reduction on the one hand, and of the provision of services on the other. If the UN is to be believed, India has lifted 415 million people from poverty in 15 years. Furthermore, various infrastructure projects providing electricity, drinking water, roads and railways to even remote parts of the hinterland are quite likely increasing the quality of life as well as the per capita income.
The other big deals, of course, are Demonetization and GST. Despite massive negative propaganda, I think the impartial observer today would be hard pressed to see these as net negatives. The giant strides made towards digitization, just by themselves, would justify the relatively minor inconvenience people went through at the time.
UPI has made inroads into the remotest interior villages (Ecowrap from the SBI says that 60% of transactions by volume and value are now coming from rural and semi-urban areas). The same report says the value of UPI payments has gone up from Rs. 6947 crore in FY17 to Rs. 139,00,000 crore in FY23, a huge growth of 2004x. The use of the smartphone as a Point of Sale system has been a nice adaptation of technology, supported by Jio and inexpensive data.
There is a video clip of P. Chidambaram, the former Finance Minister of India, mocking digital transactions. In the video, Chidambaram is speaking at an event and he says, "How can you expect a poor lady in a village to use digital transactions when there is no electricity and no POS devices?"
Pretty bad look from the supercilious Chidambaram. It is the same attitude displayed by nay-sayers from Lutyens and Khan Market: they do not believe the average Indian can or will progress. Only the mai-baap sarkar of the Nehru Dynasty can save them, they claim. On the contrary, the Nehruvian Penalty has kept 500 million Indians poor, as I wrote on Rediff.com in 2004. The reality is that under the Nehruvian Stalinists, India kept falling behind the rest of the world. After 1991, India is slowly and painfully clawing its way back up the ranks of global wealth.
The GST, despite many flaws, has also been a success in creating a single national marketplace, and in reducing logistics bottlenecks (remember those mile-long queues of trucks idling at state boundary checkpoints, and surely the enormous amounts changing hands?). As India ramps up manufacturing, the improvement in transportation efficiency will pay for itself.
None of this happened just like that, it was willed into existence, says TheEmissary in a positive post https://theemissary.co/modinomics-why-india-is-rising/ and this is true, somebody imagined it, and somebody else, yes, the very same babus, put things into motion.
Compared to all these pluses, surely the mandarins are entitled to screw up a little bit now and then. But the point is the mindset behind the TCS, and the poor communication strategy behind the Rs 2000 note withdrawal.
At a time when India is attempting to offer the rupee as a global currency, and trying to make India a more attractive investment location, the TCS (Tax Collected at Source) surely feels like a retrograde step dating back to the days of worrying about foreign exchange reserves (unnecessarily, as India’s current kitty is around $572 billion, which is close to an all-time high).
The signal it sends out is that officious babus will make life difficult for average users in the pursuit of either minor increases in tax collections or an illusory improvement in forex reserves.
Far more useful would be a deep analysis of what is causing the trade deficit with China to balloon (it is now bigger than India’s entire defense budget), which sectors or products will have the greatest bang for the buck (eg. pharma APKs), and solid Production Linked Incentives to increase Indian production of the same.
The withdrawal of the Rs. 2000 notes is probably a good idea, because by now the criminal ecosystem has figured out how to counterfeit them efficiently. As in years past, the ‘second-best’ notes are likely being produced in Pakistan and shipped through the Middle East to India. So there’s nothing wrong in removing them from circulation.
Two caveats, though. It would have been a lot better to withdraw them before the BJP’s debacle in Karnataka. It’s sort of locking the barn door after the horse has bolted. As in years past, the vast bulk of corruption money intended for elections is quite likely stored in these larger notes, and removing them from circulation is a good idea. Well, fine, this will have an impact on the 2024 elections, I imagine.
The second is the total cockup in the communication of the withdrawal. The first announcement said the notes could be deposited before a certain date, but that they would continue to be legal tender (which seems counter-intuitive). If you deposited more than Rs. 20,000 a day, though, the idea seemed to be that you would have to show some id, PAN/Aadhar. That would help identify anybody who had been hoarding large quantities of cash (usually for dubious purposes).
But then the second announcement, from SBI, said that there would be no need for any paperwork. Meanwhile people were using 2000-rupee notes to buy luxury items, especially gold.
So exactly what is going on? What is the point in this not-demonetization? Did the babus get cold feet and do U-turns?
The angel tax on startups is itself a dubious idea, especially when India is attempting to increase the viability of its homegrown early-stage companies. The regulatory atmosphere and the relative paucity of local venture funding is anyway encouraging startups to register themselves abroad, say in Singapore or Dubai or Silicon Valley. By adding a tax you’re making Indian startups less appealing to investors.
Furthermore, by picking and choosing investment from certain countries to be exempt from the tax seems either capricious or over-reach/meddling. It simply isn’t true that these Anglo and Nordic countries are all pure as the driven snow, as we have seen on numerous occasions.
The bottom line, though, is that despite periodic missteps, India’s finance folks and the central bank have done a stellar job, and it shows: India’s banks are currently among the most profitable in the world, with no worrying bank failures (unlike, say, in the US and Europe); interest rates and inflation are modest (again, unlike the US and EU). So two cheers for the babus!
1538 words, May 27, 2023, updated 1626 words, June 1, 2023
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com -
A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-crown-sceptre-and-the-saga-of-dharmapuri-12647632.html
In Malayalam, the terms are “kireedom and chenkol”, that is, crown and scepter, signifying the powerful symbols of the State. He or she who holds these is deemed to be the ruler, ruling with the full authority of the office, and the full approval of the subjects. The words chenkol in Malayalam and ‘sengol’ in Tamil are cognate, eg. Chenkotta (red fort) in Malayalam is Sengottai in Tamil.
The scepter is an important marker of kingship, so much so that during imperial times, Britain was referred to as the ‘sceptr’d isle’, that is, the unquestioned ruler of its far flung empire.
There is of course the third symbol, the throne, or ‘simhasanam’. During the recent investiture of the British king, I am sure all three of these were on full display. For some reason, the throne seems less important in Indian lore than the other two, but in a wicked pun, the great fabulist O V Vijayan in his savage satire “The Saga of Dharmapuri” equated the throne with a European toilet, as in a slang American expression for the erstwhile ‘thunder box’.
The Chola ‘sengol’ from Tamil Nadu was a sacred symbol included in a “vesting ceremony accompanied by a recital of 11 verses from the Thevaram text invoking the blessings of Shiva for the ruler” in 1947, according to S Gurumurthy in “How the Sengol embodied India’s freedom and why it was forgotten and lost” on republicworld.com. Not only was the sengol forgotten, the Cholas, and their great maritime empire that extended all the way to Indonesia, were erased.
In fact, all of South Indian history, including the fabled Vijayanagar Empire, the samurai-like kalaripayat warriors of the west coast and Tulunadu, Telugu patriots like Alluri Sitarama Raju, Travancore’s Marthanda Varma who defeated the Dutch at Colachel in 1749, and Travancore’s Chempakaraman Pillai of the INA who coined the term ‘Jai Hind’, was wiped out from the pages of textbooks. In their place, a weird pabulum of make-believe was installed.
The sacred ‘sengol’ denoting “virtuous and ethical rule” per Gurumurthy was deemed to be a personal gift, a gold walking stick given to Jawaharlal Nehru, which once again shows how a personality cult was relentlessly built up that would make Mao and Kim Il Sung green with envy. “L’etat, c’est moi” (The State, it is I), said Louis XIV, the Sun King of France. Well, we know what happened to his descendants: the guillotine. Indians, being more gentle, have not quite done the same thing. Or at least done so only metaphorically.
Which reminds me, why is/was Nehru called ‘Pandit Nehru’? Who certified him? What was he a pundit in? Did he pass some pundit exam? Ah, it was just part of the personality cult. I don’t see other Kashmiri Hindus going around calling themselves Pandit: they use their family names, so what’s special about these people?
Oh well, I guess I answered my own question. According to the cult, Nehrus were the hereditary rulers of India, and so it was only natural that the kingship would pass from the British to Nehru. There is only one slight problem. Again according to O V Vijayan in The Path of the Prophet, the Nehrus were not hereditary feudal lords, but ferrymen on the river Neher, “they who came from somewhere”, and had taken the name of the river as their surname. Jawaharlal’s grandfather Ganga Dhar was a kotwal in a Delhi police station. A Ghosh had some more startling information about this man, who was photographed in a full Pathan outfit, but I shall let that pass.
I made an attempt at deconstructing the Nehru myth in my 1999 Rediff.com essay Let us now praise famous men wherein I quote at length the relevant passage from Vijayan. In my considered opinion, Nehru was an almost unmitigated disaster for India: he thought India was his personal fiefdom, and he was entitled to dispense imperial largesse. He gave away all sorts of things (that didn’t belong to him in the first place):
* Treaty rights in Tibet inherited from the British given away in exchange for nothing
* The right of independent Tibet to exist was erased, as he colluded with Chinese road-building on the Indo-Tibetan border: Chinese troops were fed with Indian rice!
* Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir given away by taking the issue to the hostile UN instead of allowing the Indian Army to cleanse the area of invading Pakistani tribals
* UN Security Council seat, offered by both the US and Russia (yes, I can quote chapter and verse on this from Nehru’s collected writings), given away to China
* Coco Islands given away to Burma, which is now allowing China to build a naval base there
In addition, Nehru, in his own words in this video, thought that throughout history South India was a separate country. I get it, he must have taken his pundit exam along with Romila Thapar in ancient Indian history!
There is good reason to think of Jawaharlal Nehru as not quite getting the full picture (Chou En Lai allegedly referred to him, rather rudely, as a ‘useful idiot’).
Then what does that make his acolytes? That was the question Vijayan asked in “Dharmapuri”, which opens with the dramatic statement: “Prajapati wanted to s**t”, in crude Malayalam. “It was a little off the usual time that day, so the assembled dignitaries were a little disturbed when the Army Chief blew the conch signifying that the event was at hand. It was only the late afternoon. Normally Prajapati did his thing at dawn and dusk, to the accompaniment of Dharmapuri’s national song.” [See the photograph of Page 1 of the book in Malayalam]
Prajapati is seated on his ‘throne’, a toilet. That was important, because whatever Prajapati expelled into the toilet was eagerly consumed by his courtiers.
This Brechtian tale is hard to read: it invokes bibhatsa in the reader, creating both alienation and catharsis. Here’s a relevant bit: “Whoever became anybody in the kingdom, in industry, or in politics, had done so by regularly eating Prajapati’s s**t. Mothers would pray that their children would have an opportunity to consume those perfumed feces”.
That’s a gross way of putting it, but there’s an element of truth: the Dynasty demanded utter loyalty. Meanwhile, India’s economy kept declining steadily in comparison to the rest of the world, until there was a bit of a turnaround in 1991, and accelerating growth in the 2010s.
After all these years of living dangerously, India is now inching ahead. With economic growth, it is normal to think of tradition, culture and heritage.
It is only fitting, then, that the Prime Minister took part it an investiture ceremony, with several Tamil Nadu matha-adhipathis in attendance. With native Tamil and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman taking a visible role, the government has declared its intent to nip any sub-nationalism (the US ambassador’s obsession) in the bud. It is an emphatic re-assertion of pan-Indian nationalism, necessary in these times of increasingly complex geopolitics.
It is time to decisively throw off the shibboleths of the immediate post-independence period. The Chola-style sengol is being restored to its rightful place as a symbol of the resurgent Indian State, as it was intended to be in the first place, not, absurdly, some guy’s walking stick.
Errata: It was pointed out by Professor Subhash Kak that Vijayalakshmi Pandit was married to a man with the surname Pandit. The error is regretted.
1117 words, 25 May 2023, 1137 words, updated 27 May 2023, 1214 words, updated 28 May 2023
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A version of this essay was published at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-svb-collapse-how-system-wide-problem-created-by-fed-led-to-us-second-largest-bank-failure-12307942.html
There are several interesting questions about the spectacular and sudden collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). Once you get over the initial shock of this possibility in this day and age (bank runs were only supposed to happen in the bad old days), then you will be confronted with the question of what it means not only for US banks, but also for your investment strategy going forward.
In a sense, the tension between economists and finance people, who may not think alike all the time, is coming to the fore in awkward ways. Finance professionals try to avoid risk for their companies. Economists try to manage the economy according to their orthodoxies.
What is of interest is not only how rapidly the collapse happened, but also why. Plus, what the bailout (it sure smells like one, although the US authorities are emphatic that what they are doing is not a bailout) means in terms of moral hazard, and the possibility of further contagion that could lead to systemic collapse. And finally, where the safe havens are, if any, especially in view of the possible loss of primacy for the US dollar.
The apparent bare facts are as follows: there was an old-fashioned bank run on SVB, as spooked depositors withdrew about $42 billion in one day, out of roughly $219 billion total deposits taken in. In order to make the payouts, SVB had to liquidate long-term bonds that it held. These bonds, both in US Treasuries and in fixed-rate mortgage-backed securities, had lost value because of the steady increase in interest rates by the US Federal Reserve. The forced selling of these bonds caused SVB to become cash-negative (they had negative $958 million in cash). An attempt to raise more funds failed. The US government put it into receivership.
The proximate cause of the collapse is two-fold: the bank run, which was accelerated enormously because of the fact that it could be done electronically, rather than by people showing up at the doors to the bank and trying to withdraw their cash physically. Besides, SVB’s depositors were overwhelmingly large players, most of whom had balances greater than the $250,000 for which accounts are normally insured.
Once these large players, often VC-backed companies or VCs themselves, got a whiff of trouble, they were quick to act. Besides, the surprising readiness of the US government to bail them out by promising to cover all deposits, not just those below $250,000, suggests they are influential.
The preponderant cause, however, lies in a poor decision made by the SVB. As all banks do, they had to park the deposits they took in somewhere where they could get a return. Unfortunately for them (in hindsight) they chose to invest in long-term bonds. At the time (before covid) it was probably not a bad idea, because if held to maturity these bonds would yield a modest return, and they are backed by the US government.
Unfortunately, what happened is that when they bought the bonds, interest rates were at a low, and so the return on these bonds was acceptable. But then the Federal reserve started hiking up the interest rates rapidly, for good reason: to control inflation. That made the yield on the bonds go up, and conversely the bonds lost value. Especially if you had to sell them they caused you to immediately take a big ‘haircut’ as you had to write your assets down and take the loss. This is a system-wide problem, and SVB was an extreme case (but not the only one).
Which brings us to the root cause. That is the Covid-19 or Wuhan virus epidemic. One of the ways in which the US government, and other Western governments, tackled the economic fallout from shutdowns and loss of business activity was to try to stimulate the economy by basically printing a lot of money, and giving it to the public. There was debate at the time about whether this was a good idea, but everyone seems to have got behind that plan.
On the face of it, when there were lots of business failures due to the lockdowns and other disruptions, and job losses, it seemed fair to just give people a lot of money to tide them over, and to stimulate the economy. Besides, the ‘Universal Basic Income’ idea was hot among prominent economists at the time. It was considered fair that everybody would have a small but adequate income doled out by the State: a sort of Welfare State on steroids.
Every US taxpayer received a few thousand dollars as a ‘gift’, which they probably used for emergency expenditures or saved. Interestingly, the Indian government did not give out a dole; instead, it tried to fend off the hunger problem by giving out free grains and pulses to large numbers of people. In other ways, too, India took a relatively cautious approach, and did not stimulate the economy a lot during the pandemic. This proved wise.
It appears now that the vast amounts of money thus printed in the West were inflationary (not surprisingly). In the case of the US, ever since Richard Nixon delinked the dollar from gold, it has been possible for the government to print any amount of money.
On top of this, the Ukraine war caused hydrocarbon prices to surge worldwide, as well as food prices, for a variety of reasons, including sanctions on Russia on its oil and gas, and the sudden disappearance of both Russian and Ukrainian products such as fertilizer.
Inflation shot up from about 0-1% to about 6%, which is uncomfortable, and pinches the man on the street. Unfortunately, just about the only way to deal with this situation (short of ending the war in Ukraine and related disruptions, which is politically uncomfortable) is the blunt instrument of interest rate increases from the US Federal Reserve.
The US Federal funds rate, which had hovered around 0-0.25% between March 2020 and March 2022 went up in several increments of 0.75%, so that they are now at around 4.75%.
The Fed has, most recently, slowed its pace of interest rate increases, and the latest, on February 1 was only 0.25%. But the damage to banks was already done, as in the following post by Balaji Subramanian, a venture capitalist and crypto investor (note that).
Inflation is a tax on savers, and a boon for borrowers. Some economists (for example Abhijit Banerjee) have suggested that governments (the biggest borrowers) may use it as an “inflation tax” to degrade their debt obligations, although there is no evidence that this was the case here.
This suggests systemic risk, though, and sure enough, two other banks, Signature and Silvergate, also collapsed. Silicon Valley Bank was the second biggest bank in US history to collapse; Signature was the third biggest. Now there may be other factors as well: for example Silvergate was a crypto-focused bank, and Signature had exposure to crypto, and after the FTX fiasco a few weeks ago, that segment is under pressure.
When Silicon Valley Bank went into a tailspin, one of the biggest voices arguing for its rescue (note: he claims it is not a bailout) was Bill Ackman, a billionaire hedge fund manager. Ackman may or may not be correct, but what is surely interesting to Indian observers is that he was quick to denounce the Adani group and give a certificate of authenticity to Hindenburg. Twitter user @thehawkeyex pointed this out, and how the CFO of Adani mocked Ackman. Karma, I suppose. Adani is still standing, but FTX, and now SVB, are history.
Having said all this, the US has a way of being able to deal with financial firestorms, such as the global financial crisis of 2007-08. There is also the TINA factor. Where else would you put your money? Chinese yuan? Not likely! Euro? Isn’t Europe in a tailspin?
But there are a couple of ominous things in the background. Ever since Bretton Woods just after WW2, the US dollar has been the reserve currency for international transactions, in particular for oil and gas. Now, especially after sanctions on Russia, there are attempts to create non-dollar blocs. For instance there are rouble-rupee trades, and the yuan is increasingly used by China for its trade.
More importantly, there was a recent Saudi-Iran agreement brokered by China. This is startling, because Saudi Arabia has been firmly in the American camp, and Iran has been firmly out of it. These two oil giants being shepherded by China is remarkable, and it may signal that Saudi Arabia may now be looking at the petro-yuan in addition to the petro-dollar.
This is a danger to the value of the US dollar, demand for which has continued to be high because of its central role in trade and contracts between third parties, despite the loss of its earlier predominance due to America’s trade surplus in manufactured goods. If more and more contracts are denominated in other currencies, it may lose its de facto reserve currency position.
From an individual point of view, that raises questions. Where should one park one’s assets? The traditional answer has been the stable US dollar. Is that still the right answer? Should one look at commodities (notoriously volatile), or real estate (not very liquid), or gold (physical gold is not very easy to handle)?
I am tempted to say that in these volatile times, the traditional wisdom of the Indian woman may be the right approach: buy gold. And not paper gold, because that is dependent on how much you trust the intermediary that’s giving you their assurance that they will give you back your gold intact.
Things will take some time to settle. It is likely that the contagion will hit a few more American banks. I hope that it can be contained, and there will not be the global financial collapse that some doomsters have been predicting for a while. But Silicon Valley Bank is definitely the canary in the coalmine, pointing to major underlying issues.
1680 words, 15 Mar 2023
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit rajeevsrinivasan.substack.com -
A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-what-ails-united-states-poor-leadership-or-malign-forces-12211192.html
There has been a whole series of alarming news stories from the US in the recent past. Each of them individually may have good reasons, but put together, they paint a disappointing picture. As someone who has long rooted for America, I am concerned about systemic problems..
Here the stories are, in random order:
* The appearance of Chinese balloons and other Unidentified Flying Objects in the sky
* The publication of the accusation that the US blew up the NordStream 2 pipeline
* The spectacle of former Twitter executives being grilled for unlawful censorship
* The train crash that spewed a million liters of poisonous liquids into the air and ground
* The mass shooting at Michigan State, one of many
Balloongate
#Balloongate was intriguing when it was disclosed that a Chinese balloon with an attached payload had meandered its way across the entire United States before it was shot down on February 4th by an F-22, which incidentally is the most impressive fighter jet in the US air force. If I am not mistaken, people on the ground could actually see the balloon with the naked eye. Like many others, I wonder why the thing was allowed to be airborne for a week over the US mainland.
But it started taking on more sinister overtones when it turned out that three more such objects were shot down, that there had been some incursions during the tenure of former President Trump as well, and that this was apparently a regular occurrence. Surely nations spy on each other all the time, but the victims of spying generally know how to deal with it.
I was reminded of the U2 episode long ago, with American Francis Gary Powers being shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960 in his high-flying plane. This touch-and-go international incident flared up into one more Cold War spat. But the point is that nations can and do protect themselves from spies up in the sky.
Then why didn’t the most vaunted military force in history shoot these balloon intruders down upon first encountering them? What were the spy satellites doing with their killer lasers? What was the advice given by military intelligence to President Joe Biden? Why didn’t Biden bestir himself? Why didn’t they puncture the balloon over land so that its payload could be captured and inspected? Or did they not want the payload to be captured?
Online skeptics had a field day. For example,
In the end, the whole episode became rather comical, and the US air force, military intelligence and the brand-new Space Command looked incompetent, a bit Keystone-Cop-ish. Is that why they then proceeded, in a show of strength, to shoot down several more ‘UFO’s? Many questions remain unanswered. The latest reports suggest the last few were for mere show.
Nordstream 2
The detailed story alleging the US destruction of Nordstream 2 (written by Seymour Hersh) is worrying and potentially very consequential. Hersh was in the past celebrated as a journalist, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam; but his claim that the capture of Osama bin Laden was staged did not gain much credibility.
But the point is that the US and Russia are not at war, and a straightforward attack by an undeclared combatant on the physical assets of an adversary may be treated as a declaration of war. Let us remember that iconic event in 20th century US history: the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The US felt that was a good enough reason to enter World War II.
The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident (which may have been fake news of an attack on US naval ships) was the trigger for the US to enter the Vietnam War. Earlier, William Randolph Hearst in 1898 (falsely) claimed Spain sank the USS Maine to induce the Spanish-American War.
Thus there is precedent in American history itself for an unprovoked attack being taken as reason for hostilities and a declaration of war. My concern is that the Russians, embroiled though they are in Ukraine, may consider the Nordstream incident to be sufficient justification for war, or possibly sabotage, in the US (see below). There are discreet ways of unrestricted warfare.
Media censorship
The malign role media can play, as also seen in the Hearst story above, was brought into sharp relief in the Congressional hearings on Twitter’s suppressio veri, suggestio falsi. Clips circulating on the Net showed members of Congress tearing into former Twitter executives in charge of wokeness and censorship, Vijaya Gadde and Yoel Roth, for illegally limiting their Freedom of Speech. Much has been said in this context via the Twitter Files, released online.
The deliberate suppression of news seems to be the in-thing in today's America. We remember how highly damaging information about the Hunter Biden laptop was swept under the carpet. Similarly, medical professionals were made personae non grata and deplatformed when they spoke against the excesses of Covid mania (a Congressperson asked Vijaya Gadde where she got her medical degree from so she could silence Harvard and Stanford medical professors!).
In addition, there is the damning Columbia Journalism Review report by Pulitzer Prize winner Jeff Gerth about how the entire media gaslighted the country regarding alleged Russian collusion with former President Trump. The media is no longer about “all the news fit to print”.
The massive spill that nobody has heard of
A splendid example of that phenomenon is happening under our very noses now as the mainstream media has totally suppressed the information about the February 3rd rail accident near East Palestine, Ohio. This may well be the biggest chemical spill in recent American history. Piecing together information from diverse sources online, it appears several cars of a train carrying vinyl chloride derailed.
It seems that a million liters of vinyl chloride may have been spilled, and the chemical is highly reactive, although used as an ingredient in the making of stable poly-vinyl chloride, a common plastic. Not only will this have got into the groundwater, and into the nearby Ohio river watershed, which means trouble downstream (dead fish are showing up in the waterways). Significant amounts of the chemical burned, and have formed hazardous clouds which may be carried along by prevailing winds.
This may well be a disaster as big as the Love Canal chemical dump near Niagara Falls some time ago, although not as big as the Chernobyl or Fukushima nuclear disasters. Yet, 20 days later, there is almost no coverage in the US media. Why? It’s like the Sherlock Holmes meme of “the curious incident of dog in the night time”. The dog didn’t bark because it knew the perpetrator of a crime.
But the real question is, is this spill a coincidence? Or is it possible that either Russians or the Chinese are ‘punishing’ the US with plausible deniability? The Chinese have enough fifth columnists in the US to do anything they want; the Russians may or may not have them.
Of course it could simply be the result of poor maintenance and lax regulation. Fingers were pointed at Pete Buttigieg, the hapless Transportation honcho, but the real reason may well be a consequence of the wholesale transfer of manufacturing to China.
Anyway, the root cause may be the Ukraine war in one case (Russia) or general pre-2024 election interference in the other case (China). The US would be better off spending the $44 billion it has already earmarked for Ukraine on its own turf to fix creaking infrastructure or health systems.
Or in doing something about its law and order problems. There was yet another unfortunate mass shooting incident, this time at Michigan State. Why do these happen with such metronomic regularity in the US (and pretty much nowhere else)?
Is it poor leadership? Or are many malign forces attacking the country? Or is it just decadence and decline? Voters need to think this through as they prepare for Election 2024. Well, there’s Biden, and Trump, Nikki Haley, and now Vivek Ramaswamy. This is getting interesting.
1330 words, Feb 15th 2023, updated Feb 23rd.
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A version of this essay has been published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-sarpam-thullal-naga-dance-of-kerala-12175812.html
Kerala has a long tradition of Naga (sarpa, serpent) worship, as has also been the case in some parts of the Northeast. There are sarpa kavu or untouched patches of virgin forest, where serpent deities reside. There are large temples, for example Mannarsala, where childless couples make offerings to gain the boon of a baby: Nagas are believed to grant fertility.
The Theyyams of Malabar, as well as the bhoota kola of neighboring Tulunadu, celebrate the autochthonic deities of the region. As in the superb film Kantara and to a lesser extent in the film Malikappuram about a girl-child who is an ardent devotee of Swami Ayyappan of Sabarimala, the deities of the land are a powerful presence in the daily lives of the faithful.
In Kantara the traditions are presented with neither explanation nor apology: they just are. In Malaikappuram, which is a very good film as well, there is a bit of a tendency to ‘explain’ away mystical and spiritual experiences in ‘modern, scientific’ terms (which Kantara wisely refrains from, and that is a major part of its charm).
There are traditions where the deities physically inhabit the faithful who have been chosen and undergone the required purification rituals, and the faithful have experiences that are not necessarily amenable to rational, scientific explanation: which probably just means that science hasn’t caught up with tradition. The oracle-like velichapads of Kerala, the oracular vestal virgins of ancient Greece, and the spirit dancers of the bhoota kola are examples.
So are the Nagaraja, Naga Yakshi, Sarpa Yakshi, Mani Nagam, Kari Nagam, Kuzhi Nagam and Kanyavu of the sarpam thullal that I attended at the family temple of some relatives in Alappuzha district in Kerala. They are chosen from among the matrilineal descendants of the family. Apart from the Nagaraja who is a male, the others are all female, and the Kanyavu is a pre-pubescent girl-child.
In passing, matriliny/Devi worship and Naga worship appear to go hand in hand.
I had seen videos of and listened to the hypnotic music of the sarpam thullal before: it is easy to imagine being induced into a trance while listening to it. But this was the first time I was fortunate enough to see it.
The ‘penitents’ stay in the temple for a week or so. (I am reluctant to use that term because they are not sinners, but rather the chosen few who are fortunate enough to experience the rituals first hand. But that seems to be the closest term in English. I think I’ll instead use the neutral term ‘Naga dancers’ for them.) They undergo purification rites (kappu kettu), perform ritual vrtam, and are put on a special sattvic diet that excludes salt or spice.
In addition, there are piniyal (literally minions), other family members who are not part of the thullal itself, but whose duty it is to protect the vulnerable Naga dancers who do enter into a trance-like state and are unaware of their surroundings as they sway to the music. The piniyal do not have to stay in the temple but do undergo the same vratam.
This particular sarpam thullal is conducted once every three years, and it goes on for three days at the temple, which was cleaned up, the surroundings cleared of vegetation, and lit up with bright lights. There are several thullals a day: late morning and/or late afternoon and late night. I attended the second day’s events, afternoon and night: it went on till two in the morning.
The entire function is orchestrated by a Pulluva chief, a tribal man who has a traditionally strong connection with Naga deities. In most temples in Kerala, there is a subsidiary shrine for the Naga deities, and on auspicious days, especially the ayilyam (ashlesha) nakshatra which is associated with Nagas, a Pulluva singer will sing an invocation for you, playing his violin-like instrument that is the basis of the thullal music, which also includes a deft chenda drum orchestra and nadaswaram pipes.
A major part of the thullal is the creation of the kalam or the drawing on which the naga dancers perform their dance, swaying to music. This is done in a custom-built pandal (covered temporary structure decorated with young coconut leaves). Using vegetable dyes, the Pulluva can quite amazingly create a beautiful and complex drawing in a couple of hours, with a Naga theme. Sadly, it is ephemeral, because the dancers will destroy it shortly thereafter.
These photos are of a kalam in the shape of a serpent coiled around a black palm tree (karimpana), with various Naga dancers in the foreground, getting ready for the thullal.
The dancers are brought to the kalam after an invocation ceremony and obeisance to the deities. They do a circumambulation of the kalam, and then they are given a bunch of tender florets of the arecanut tree, which they hold to their faces. Apparently the fragrance of the florets helps induce the trance state, and then they move to the kalam and start swaying rhythmically to the music, which waxes and wanes in a sinuous manner in a metaphor for a serpent’s motion.
As they move around, the dancers appear to become more and more detached from their normal, daily selves, and more and more involved in the trance state. Their movements become more uncontrolled, and their eyes and expressions take on an other-worldly hue. They are liable to hurt themselves by hitting the pillars of the pandal, or falling into the audience crowding around. So their piniyal form a protective cordon, linking arms, so that the dancers are safe.
They are given tender coconuts to refresh them while they dance. Sometimes they seem to be searching for someone in the audience. They may choose a person, and summon them to give them a tender coconut, in what is considered a blessing. Indeed, the dancers look mesmerized. I was told by a niece that a few years ago, she was watching the dance, and suddenly she felt the uncontrollable urge to join the dancers herself, and so she did.
After dancing the kalam to dust, the dancers then run to the sarpa kavu (sacred grove) and the nearby temple pond, where they immerse themselves, again with the piniyal joining them to ensure they don’t harm themselves. I watched the young Nagaraja run with astonishing speed to the kavu, so fast that his piniyal couldn’t keep up. He crashed into a tree and I was afraid he might have suffered a concussion. But doctors examined him, and he was fine.
In our case, the Naga dancers included several young women, a middle-aged woman who had come all the way from the US, the teenaged Nagaraja, and the 9 year-old girl Kanyavu. I noticed that the Kanyavu was reluctant to participate. She stood aside, looking confused. But on the final day, she suddenly danced with full enthusiasm.
After their visits to the kavu and the pond, the Nagas, now soaking wet, come back to the kalam pandal, and after some further ceremonies, that thullal is over, and they go back to their temporary accommodation in the temple. There are two or three thullals a day, and it obviously physically taxing for the Nagas, as well as for piniyal. The most elaborate one is at night and it goes on well into the early morning, say 2am.
I was present for the afternoon and night thullal on the second day. I should have been there for the third and concluding day, but I had to leave. So I was watching the live broadcast of the event around 11pm, and then there was a commotion among the ladies sitting on mats on the ground next to the kalam.
It was because a small serpent was sinuously wending its way towards the main temple steps.
This was astonishing. It was a finger-sized serpent about 3 feet in length, with a silvery spotted body. It went as far as the steps to the main Mahadeva shrine, in front of which the kalam pandal was, and remained there for a while.
Then it slithered up the back of a plastic chair, coiled itself around it, and remained there for the rest of the thullal until the final ceremony.
Someone brought the serpent a little nurum palum on a banana leaf: this is the mixture of milk, turmeric etc that is the main offering at Naga ceremonies. The serpent appeared to take a few sips of this.
Let us remember that all this happened in a place where the entire vegetation had been removed using a JCB backhoe just a week or two prior. There were a couple of hundred people sitting or milling around the pandal. There was deafening amplified music from the chenda orchestra. None of this seemed to deter the serpent. After the final ceremony where the Naga dancers return to their normal lives (kapp-azhippu), it disappeared below the roots of one of the nandyar-vattam medicinal plants around the temple, without any fuss.
I had heard from a relative that a few years prior, three serpents had come to this thullal. To be honest, I was skeptical: why would serpents, which try to avoid humans, come to such a loud ceremony? Then I saw a video of a recent thullal in another temple in Alappuzha, where again a finger-width (but this time golden-colored) serpent had arrived, stayed, and then disappeared.
But the fact that I was seeing this in real time (albeit on video feed) was staggering. None of my rational, scientific beliefs could explain what had happened: why on earth did this serpent appear and seem to be unperturbed, and even enjoy the ceremony? I have no answer. The only thing I can think of is Kantara’s premise: there are spirits and demi-gods all around us, if only we learn to look.
There is the belief that the real Nagas (such as the slender silver- and gold-colored ones I saw in videos) are not the same as the usual snakes one encounters. These are special, with semi-divine attributes, and they are the ones that accept our offerings.
One of my favorite writers, the brilliant Malayalam fabulist O V Vijayan, once explained to me his short story The Little Ones, about benign ancestral spirits that appeared as points of light in the sky when the family was going through troubles. It’s the same idea: unseen, unknown and often benign (presumably there are malign ones too) powers that we are only dimly aware of.
I had wanted for years to see a sarpam thullal, because of the hypnotic quality of its music that I had heard, and because of the connection between matriliny, Devi worship and Naga worship that were all hallmarks of Hindu Kerala society for long. It is my theory that these, along with ample monsoon rains and the rice and spice trade, had enabled Kerala, especially Travancore, to be a fairly prosperous tropical paradise.
Now that I have seen the thullal, I am even more in awe of my ancestors, who knew a thing or two: they had some of the most accurate calendars in the world; in the 14th century CE, Kerala mathematician Madhava of Sangamagrama discovered rapidly converging infinite series for trigonometric functions (the basis of calculus and of navigation across the open ocean). As early as the 2nd century BCE, Pliny the Younger was complaining that Roman coffers were being emptied for the spices of Kerala, especially pepper.
We must try to understand why our long-standing traditions have survived. Lindy, as Nassim Taleb would say: they survived because they have meaning, and value.
1950 words, 13 Feb 2023
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A version of this essay has been published by rediff.com at https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rajeev-srinivasan-target-eject-modi/20230208.htm
Now that the hosannas to Pervez Musharraf have reached a crescendo (eg. Michael Kugelman of Foreign Policy: “...[he] could have well authored a peace deal with India”) perhaps it’s worth remembering not only the ‘how’ of the Gujarat riots of 2002, but also the ‘why’.
People seem to be suffering from selective amnesia about what happened then, and that’s what the BBC’s hatchet-job on Modi is taking advantage of. Most of us have forgotten. I was paying close attention then, and wrote quite a bit about what happened, but the details are a bit hazy. And so it is easy to ‘frame’ the events in ways that push certain agendas.
Here are a few facts that I remember from those days:
* Narendra Modi was an unknown then. He had been thrust into the limelight after the Bhuj Earthquake in 2001, and underwent a baptism by fire, so to speak
* After the torching of the Sabarmati Express and the gruesome burning alive of 59 pilgrims, the chatterati felt that they deserved it for being Hindu pilgrims returning from Ayodhya. The Washington Post quoted Teesta Setalvad saying exactly that
* There were no funeral processions for the dead, which would have inflamed passions; indeed the dead remain nameless, and nobody knows their individual stories. This is in sharp contrast to the funeral processions of slain terrorists in J&K, and tear-jerking stories from sympathetic media about their being sons of headmasters or whatever
* The Sabarmati Express burning was perpetrated on February 27th, riots began on the 28th, and the Indian Army was on the ground one day later, on March 1st. But analysts pretended that February has 31 days, and said “Modi did nothing for 3 days”
* Nearby Congress governments (eg in Madhya Pradesh) refused to send armed police contingents that might have controlled the riots
* There is, in the background, the massing of the Indian Army at the Pakistan border, in Operation Parakram. The Gujarat riots entirely dissipated the momentum behind a possible punitive invasion.
I wrote several columns at the time, and re-reading them brings up a number of points I had forgotten: Blaming the hindu victim http://usnews.rediff.com/news/2002/mar/07rajeev.htm, Godhra, secular progressives https://www.rediff.com/news/2002/mar/25rajeev.htm, Predatory intelligentsia https://www.rediff.com/news/2002/may/13rajeev.htm
Most of the focus of the coverage has been on the riots, in which officially 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus were killed. There was a Banerjee Commission that concluded the train coach had been subject to spontaneous combustion. A Supreme Court SIT concluded, on the contrary, that there was a conspiracy to set the coach on fire.
Activists contributed plenty of disinformation.
Thus a lot has been said about how the riots happened, but there has been relatively little about why they did. That’s where Operation Parakram and Musharraf (who was in power in Pakistan at the time) come into the picture. By several accounts, Musharraf was a good tactician, but a poor strategist, as seen, for example, in the Kargil War: he had the advantage of surprise, but he was forced into an ignominious retreat.
The same thing was probably behind the Parliament attack on 13th December 2001. In the wake of the September 2001 (“9/11”) attack on the World Trade Center in New York, Pakistan was facing heat from the Americans for possibly harboring Osama bin Laden. What better than to divert attention with an assault on the hated BJP government in India, using terrorist cannon-fodder? There had also been an attack on the J&K Assembly in October 2001, for which there had been no serious consequences.
Tactically clever, but not so strategic. For, not only did the attacks fail to do any major damage, it got India so riled up that under Operation Parakram India massed troops on the border. The signal was that India was going to invade, despite the Pakistani threat of first use of nuclear warheads. India seemed resolute, and counter-mobilization was getting expensive to sustain.
There was interesting chatter on the leftist Internet at the time that ‘something’ would happen to break the deadlock (I was not aware of it then, but it was discussed by the Bharat-Rakshak forum). Lefties knew something would happen, but not what it was. And that ‘something’ was quite likely the Sabarmati Express burning. It was a tactical success: India had to abandon Operation Parakram.
But perhaps it was a strategic failure because it launched Narendra Modi’s national political career, and here we are in 2023: Musharraf is dead, Modi is popular, and the Indian economy is doing rather well.
Of course, there are forces that are not so happy with all this: e.g. the very same Deep State that likes Armani-suited, Gucci-wearing generalissimos like Musharraf. There is a regime-change operation in the works. First, there was Victoria Nuland, the architect of Ukraine’s regime-change (and we all know how well that has turned out for Ukraine), who showed up in Delhi last year, and met the usual suspects.
Then there has been a slew of recent activity that is, one might hypothesize, aimed at containing India’s rise, and a key aspect of it is ejecting Modi. The full-court press on India over Ukraine, the BBC ‘documentary’, the Oxfam report, the Hindenburg attack on Adani and obliquely on the Indian economy, and any number of other acts are signs that India is a target.
The most recent incident is a visit by Hillary Clinton to Gujarat. A case could have been made for denying her a visa, for war crimes in Libya on her watch, including the brutal killing of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. That would only have been sweet revenge for the US denying Modi a visa citing the Gujarat riots. Modi, as the WSJ reports, was the only person ever denied a visa based on an obscure law on religious freedom.
The attention being paid to India by the Deep State is alarming. We can expect any number of additional acts. The 2024 Election Season is well and truly up and running, although it would be wise of Deep State to focus on what’s happening in the US: their candidate may well lose, given the stories coming out of the woodwork about election manipulation.
1050 words, 7 Feb 2023
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A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/opinion/shadow-warrior-three-exemplars-of-indian-cinema-in-2022-rrr-the-kashmir-files-and-kantara-11940742.html
2022 was a watershed year for Indian cinema and cinephiles. At long last, the formulaic Hindi/Urdu cinema that has dominated both mindshare and box office took a beating, for it appears to no longer appeal to the consuming public. It has long been accused of lack of originality; its anti-Indian slant, and especially its overt anti-Hindu stance, have now begun to annoy large numbers of viewers. They voted with their wallets, as per BookMyShow.
The yeoman efforts by @GemsofBollywood to demonstrate bad faith on the part of the industry have had an impact, as can be seen from the number of expensive flops: Lal Singh Chaddha, Shamshera, Raksha Bandhan, Cirkus, Dobaara, Liger. They should change course, though given the current crop of agenda-ridden poseurs and nepo-kids, it’s not clear they can.
As a direct consequence of the arrival a few years ago of high-bandwidth fiber-to-the-home, many cinema viewers have also become accustomed to a wide range of offerings on OTT like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. This has made them aware of cinema from around the world that frankly shows that Bollywood has always been inferior in content and form, except for the film music (at least in earlier days).
I was at one time a cineaste, enjoying the 20th century works of Kurosawa, Ray, Eisenstein, the Italian and French masters, Bergman, and the Indian New Wave. It was easy to dismiss the cinematic quality of the Mumbai film industry; but it has always been influential, and has set the narrative about India both internally and in the developing world, as well as Russia and Japan.
For a variety of reasons (including simple prejudice), the Mumbai film industry has not been able to make a mark on Western audiences, and RRR is the first Indian film to make waves in the US market. In a positive write-up about why RRR deserves an Oscar, perhaps for Best Picture (yes, not for Best International Feature), Douglas Laman suggests that Indian films have been unfairly ignored (h/t Hari G).
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The fact is that all three of the films that became visible successes in 2022 (along with other big box-office successes KGF 2, Ponniyin Selvan, Pushpa) have origins outside the formulaic Mumbai industry, and it may well be the beginning of a trend. The three are distinctive and different, and it is arguable that they are archetypes of three types or even three genres of cinema.
Cinema as spectacle
RRR is cinema as spectacle (harking back to the big Hollywood productions whose intent it was to awe); The Kashmir Files is realistic, almost documentary in tone; and Kantara, the most difficult to precisely pigeonhole, is impressionistic, a cultural phenomenon immersing you in a world that you must be an insider to fully appreciate.
RRR is the easiest for audiences to appreciate, because it compels suspension of disbelief, and draws you into its make-believe world with its fantastic stunts and subtle theme of rebellion against authority and cruel white colonialism (which appeals to the newly woke sentiment of film fans especially in the US). It is cinema as entertainment; the dances and the swashbuckling take center stage with the buddy story while the freedom struggle is sort of in the background.
In a sense this kind of cinema is the lineal descendant of the story-tellers and bards of old. In India we had the katha-kalakshepam artists and traveling theater troupes telling/performing stories from the Puranas. Similarly, in many places there were shadow-puppet shows, again with heroic stories from the epics (like the wayang kulit of Java). Children would sit breathless often in dim lamplight, entranced by tales of brave warriors and fair maidens.
SS Rajamouli, the director of RRR, is in that tradition: he tells tall tales, and he does it well. In fact, his two Baahubali films were masterpieces of the art, and they were among the very best Indian films in decades. Gorgeous sets, glorious set-piece battles, beautiful princesses, treachery, stalwart warriors, noble companions, fearsome villains – the works.
And they were entirely believable because they were epics set in the (distant) mythical past, fables. Hollywood used to specialize in these too: remember Ben Hur and the like? Or even Kurosawa’s Ran, Seven Samurai and Kagemusha. Therein lies my small gripe about RRR: since it is set in the recent past, I found it hard to engage with the superhuman stunts and the dance sequences, which were quite appropriate in the Baahubali films. Okay, that’s just me.
This also probably means that Rajamouli will be snatched away by Hollywood’s rich ecosystem, as has happened to talented Hong Kong and Australian directors, who moved on to bigger and better things and global fame after relocating. That would be good for him, but bad for Indian film.
Realist cinema, including cinema verite
I am a fan of the understated and realistic school, having always preferred the low-key off-Bollywood film, such as Charulata, Pather Panchali, Bhuvan Shome, Chomana Dudi and in particular in Malayalam Uttarayanam, Thampu, Elippathayam. There is a subset of this realism, the class of historical film that does not veer into propaganda, for instance the Soviet masterpiece Battleship Potemkin or the Jewish-holocaust epic Schindler’s List.
Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri, who created The Kashmir Files, is known for his powerful and hard-hitting contemporary portrayals of Indian culture. His Buddha in a Traffic Jam was an indictment of the ‘Urban Naxal’ phenomenon that seems to have infiltrated academia and media, and which, one could cogently argue, is a grave and existential threat to the nation.
All of us who lived through the dark days of the 1990s and remember the newspaper headlines about Jammu and Kashmir then knew terrible things happened there to the minority population: a violent, religion-motivated ethnic cleansing. But much of this was swept under the carpet in the interest of some Nehruvian-Stalinist secularism. Unlike for other peoples who were targeted and exterminated, there has been no truth and reconciliation for Kashmiri Hindus.
The Kashmir Files is almost entirely based on actual, well-documented atrocities against a defenseless civilian population, slightly fictionalized, and it is a damning indictment of the fecklessness of the Indian State, and in particular of the mindset that allowed the murders, rapes, and ethnic cleansing of Indian citizens by foreign-funded terrorists. [Note the Jammu attacks on Jan 2, 2023 as well: Hindus targeted and shot, and IEDs left in the house].
That an Israeli leftist film-maker dared to deride TKF as ‘vulgar propaganda’ as the head of the jury of the government-sponsored International Film Festival of India 2022 shows that the pusillanimity of the Indian State continues to this day. (I was also reminded of the powerful Malayalam Piravi, about one of the young men who ‘disappeared’ during the Emergency.)
But nothing takes away from the reality of the Kashmir holocaust; TKF is as chilling, and as accurate, a portrait as the Killing Fields was of Pol Pot’s Cambodian holocaust of the 1970s.
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Cultural and spiritual phenomenon
Kantara is a difficult-to-define film, because it doesn’t fit into a neat category. I wish I could say it was like Kurasawa’s works, for example Rashomon, which immerse you into medieval Japan without apology or explanation. But Kurosawa was deeply influenced not only by traditional Japanese literature and theater, but also by Western film and theater traditions, and therefore his work is pretty much immediately understandable to a Western audience.
Not so with Kantara. It is hard enough for many Indians to relate to the film; I imagine it would be well-nigh impossible for those from a non-Hindu frame of mind to do so. Even among Hindus, quite a few were baffled and could not relate to it. I was induced to see it by a wonderful review by the photographer Gowri Subramanya, and my expectations were sky-high.
I could immediately understand and relate to the idea that there are spirits all around, a typically Hindu view. Thinking about it later, I remembered O V Vijayan’s Little Ones, about benign family spirits that appeared as little dancing points of light, always there in times of trouble. But many Hindus might find it hard to relate to.
I too had a bit of a hard time relating to the protagonist Siva’s (played by director Rishab Shetty himself) wayward life: all the drinking and boar-hunting and the ‘bro’ life irritated me because I wanted him to be the bhoota kola spirit dancer that he avoided becoming. (Spoiler alert) But in the end, he cannot evade his destiny, and in a glorious apotheosis he does become the fearsome Guliga. I later realized he had to go through his Hero’s Journey (as Nambi did in Rocketry): that was what the story was all about.
Maybe I was primed to appreciate Kantara, as Malabar’s theyyams are almost identical to the bhoota kola in neighboring Tulunadu. I have watched, at dusk, the awe-inspiring appearance of the thee-poti, or the Devi with fire; and the Gulikan, the fierce guardian deity. They appeal to me, for I believe in this land and its ancient autochthonic deities.
And here’s an interesting dance interpretation of varaharoopam by two Kerala women. Varaha Roopam|Dance choreography |Pooja and Mariya |Kantara
But a lot of Hindus have been gaslighted and taught in school to disdain the gods of their ancestors; they have picked up half-baked Western, Abrahamic prejudices, which in the final analysis are based on blind faith that is doctrinally defined to be unquestionable. They are apologetic, and may try to ‘explain’ the Hindu world-view to those who are programmed to not comprehend.
If you will pardon my introducing a personal note, this is very much like what happened when the late Varsha Bhosle and I started writing unapologetic Hindu nationalist columns on rediff.com around 1995. They resonated with many; but others, nurtured on standard leftie fare, fulminated against us as though we violated their deeply held beliefs. Well, actually, yes.
I have seen innumerable films that either demonize Hinduism (almost the entire oeuvre of Urduwood) or try to present a sanitized face for Western consumption. Kantara is the first film I have seen that presents Hindu beliefs as itihasa (iti-hasa, thus it is and was). This is the way things are. Deal with it.
The fact that these three films of three different genres were successful – and the intensely patriotic Rocketry: The Nambi Effect was a hit too – is a tremendous boost for India. It’s time to move away from self-flagellating mediocrity to proudly present Indian cinema as part of a cultural renaissance, as Japan, Hong Kong and Korea have done in the past.
1750 words, 1 Jan 2023
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