Fifty years of the Goa annexation

Fifty years ago, five centuries of Portuguese dominion in Goa was brought to an end by an Indian invasion, at the cost of less than sixty lives, divided more or less equally between Indian and Portuguese forces. My uncle (father's elder brother) was a young air force pilot at the time, and, years later, he told me of his role in the operation.
He had flown a transport to Goa to evacuate Indian soldiers after the battle. News from the war zone was sketchy; there were reports the airport had been shelled. From the sky, the airstrip looked badly cratered, except for the first third of it, which appeared normal. My uncle aimed for the verge of the airstrip and hit the emergency brakes as soon as the aircraft's wheels touched the ground. He managed to get the machine to stop before the battle-scarred zone.
My memory isn't perfect at this point, but if I recall right, my uncle said there was a problem getting the plane to restart because of the emergency procedure he'd employed. It took him nearly as long to get to the building where armymen were waiting, as it had to fly from Bombay to Panjim. The victorious Indian soldiers appeared to have emptied Goa's liquor stores. Each soldier was carrying crates of rum, whiskey and feni. Once the men and booze were on board, the plane took off from a state that was now part of India.
The emergency brakes had been unnecessary. What had appeared to be damage from artillery shells was just asphalt patch-ups on a concrete runway.
When I land in Goa these days, I notice they still use asphalt to repair the runway, and the strip still looks battle-scarred when viewed from the air.

Vodafone: it gets worse

I call Vodafone's Bombay Nodal Office about my recharge problem. A five minute wait, while a recorded message assures me my call is important. Then, a gentleman named Sushil comes on.
Me: Hello, I recharged for 1000 rupees and got only 7 rupees talktime plus a 3G data plan I don’t want.
Sushil: We have not received payment from you.
Me: But I got a message from Vodafone confirming the recharge.
Sushil: Could you check your bank account to see if any money has been deducted?
Me: OK, hold on. (I quickly sign on to my Netbanking account) Yes, 1000 rupees was deducted yesterday.
Sushil: I request you to send us a scan of the bank statement.
Me: I’ll do no such thing. I’m confirming that the money’s been deducted and I have a message saying you have received the money. I can forward that text if you want.
Sushil: It’s OK. Somebody will get in touch with you within 24 hours to solve your problem.

A few hours later I get a call from a Vodafone customer care executive. I explain the issue.
Executive: Sir, the 1000 rupee recharge comes with the 3G dataplan.
Me: But there was no information about that on the ATM screen when I recharged. I don’t want 3G and I don’t want any dataplan. I just want my talktime.
Executive: Sorry sir, but the 1000 rupee recharge comes with the data plan.
Me: I’ve recharged for years from the ATM, occasionally 1000 rupees at a time. If there was a change you should have informed customers about it. You send so many text messages otherwise, why not for this.
Executive: I’ll get back to you, sir.

He doesn’t get back. The next morning, I call the Nodal Officer’s number again. This time there’s a fifteen minute wait, after which Sushil comes on line. We have a long back and forth during which he keeps telling me I have no option but to accept the data plan. Frustrated, I ask for his senior.
Me: What’s your full name Sushil.
Sushil: Sushil Dhuriya.
Me: Put me through to your boss, Sushil Dhuriya.
Sushil: I can’t do that.
Me: The Vodafone website says there’s a Nodal Officer to whom complaints can be addressed. Her name is Zillah Vaz.
Sushil: The Nodal Officer does not deal with individual complaints.
Me: So if I want to complain that you have failed to solve my problem, there’s nobody I can talk to?
Sushil: No.

Apparently, Vodafone India plans to make money from 3G by forcing data plans down the throats of customers without their consent. I’m ready to jump to a different service provider, but I need to get my grand’s worth of talk first.

Meanwhile, some guys at the company have read my blog and are posting messages saying they want to help. I filled in the form as requested, now they want an alternative number because mine wasn't on when they called. Well, I switched it off because I attended a lecture yesterday afternoon. They obviously just tried at one time and then gave up.

Vodafone India: how bad can customer service get?

Interacting with MTNL always makes my blood pressure rise. But Vodafone has proved that a privately held MNC can do a worse job of customer service than a public sector undertaking. So bad is Vodafone's service, in fact, that it has shaken me out of my slumber and got me blogging again.
First stage: I travel to Thailand. The international roaming function does not work, so I can neither make nor receive calls during my stay. I don't mind that overmuch, since it's not a work trip. A while after I return, a message arrives saying 99 rupees have been deducted from my account for International Roaming. In other words, IR gets switched on automatically when I travel abroad, though it does not work. Then I keep getting charged each month unless I deactivate a function I have no idea was ever activated. The news about the IR-related deduction arrives, as do all Vodafone messages, at 4.30 am. Maybe the company believes disturbing customers' sleep helps keep them loyal.
Last evening, I recharge my Prepaid account for a thousand rupees at the ATM. I get a message telling me my recharge has given me talk time of 7.04 rupees. A second message says my Data Pack is active. I have not applied for any Data Pack, but I presume that's what has gobbled up most of the recharge money.
This morning's 4.30 am SMS says International Roaming has been stopped because of insufficient funds in my account. Had the proper amount from my recharge been credited, I'd have lost a chunk of it because I'd forgotten to deactivate IR. Small mercies.
Once I'm fully awake, I try getting to the bottom of the Data Pack mess. Vodafone provides three Customer Care numbers: 198 and 111 can only be called from a Vodafone Mobile phone, while +91 9820098200 works from any mobile or landline. 111 is a chargeable call, and 198 is toll free. The two serve exactly the same purpose, but most customers are used to 111 from the old days, and have that number saved on their phones. Nice trick.
I call the three numbers in turn and, in each case, am provided a series of options by an electronic voice. None of the options relates to my problem. Not only is there no way to lodge a complaint, but there's also no way to get past the electronic messages to speak to an actual human being.
Here's where MTNL does better than Vodafone. 198 on MTNL is a number dedicated to complaints, and one which gives you a docket number at the end of your call. Vodafone's website states, "You can contact our Nodal Officer with the complaint docket number (the unique complaint number you get when you register your complaint at Vodafone Care) anytime from Monday to Friday, between 9:30 am and 6:00 pm." The problem is, you will never get a docket number, because Vodafone Care does not allow you to actually complain about anything.

When Vodafone was Orange / Hutch, if one didn't choose any of the nine options offered by the recorded message on the customer service number, the call would be transferred to a customer service executive. That no longer happens. India might be the call center capital of the world, but, after Vodafone bought a stake in what used to be Orange / Hutch, they've downgraded customer service functionality. And it was never very good anyway. In fact, one of my Time Out columns focused on its shortcomings. Naresh, Time Out's editor at the time, printed the piece even though the magazine was (and is) published by the Ruias, who owned Orange / Hutch and hold a large stake in Vodafone. I wrote, in that column, "I’ve concluded that customer service in India is a simulacrum. It does everything it is supposed to do except serve customers. It’s a bird which looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, but is not a duck."
Vodafone's Customer Care has refined the simulacrum further, taking it to a new level of sophistication.

The Universe is Expanding

The Nobel Prize for Physics this year has been awarded to three researchers who showed that the universe is expanding at an increasing pace. Physicists don't yet know how this could be happening; they've had to dream up a massive amount of hypothetical invisible matter to get their equations right.
As a boy, I was pretty interested in astronomy. I remember reading about quasars that were 10 billion light years away and thinking, "Well, why should quasars only be found at the fringes of the universe? What's so special about the edge, except that the light reaching us from there is coming from the farthest back in time? If a chap stood on one of those quasars and looked toward us right this second, maybe he'd see a quasar too. Maybe, the universe was full of quasars ten billion years ago."
Well, apparently it was, more or less.
Before I got to the quasars bit, I learned the universe was expanding. I wasn't a morose type as a kid. The knowledge that the universe was expanding, and the stars and planets would probably keep drifting farther apart and grow ever colder till all communication and all life ceased, was about the only thing that depressed me around the age of ten. When I saw Annie Hall years later, I realised Alvy Singer had felt the same way back during World War II.



Unlike Alvy, though, I stopped doing homework a while before I read about the Big Bang theory.

Koh Samui: Making the Connection

I've travelled a fair amount over the years, but that evidently hasn't stopped me from planning dumb itineraries. After Jabeen and I decided to vacation in Koh Samui, I booked the tickets on Bangkok Airways, which now flies daily to the Thai capital from Bombay, and has the most flights to Samui (I read somewhere that the airline owns Samui airport). The cheapest available flight from Bangkok to Samui was scheduled just an hour after the arrival time of our Bombay-Bangkok flight. I thought to myself, "It's a squeeze, but Samui airport offers visas on arrival, so we just need to transfer directly to our connecting flight without any intervening visa hassles".

An elementary mistake, as I was informed at the check-in counter in Bombay. Since the Bangkok-Samui leg was a domestic flight, we'd need to get visas before boarding it. Recalling how long the visa process had taken on my last visit to Thailand, I recognised there was little hope of making our connecting flight.

But Bangkok Airways and Thai immigration outdid themselves in helping us out. Our plane landed just ahead of time and, as we entered the terminal, I spotted a Bangkok Airways staffer holding up a placard with our names on it. This was 6 am, IST. He rushed us to the counter where visa forms were handed out. By 6.10, we had filled the forms and changed money to pay for the visas. He then led us to a fast track counter, where our visas were stamped in under five minutes (the other counter was thronged with applicants, mostly Indian). In another five minutes we went through passport control. At 6.25 we passed security. At exactly 6.30, we were at the gate from which the Samui flight was to take off. It began boarding seven minutes later, and we touched down on the island by 8 am, Indian time.

I said to myself, "Here's a country that takes tourism seriously".

Despite all their efforts on our behalf, we almost managed to mess things up in another way. We'd completely forgotten that our photographs would have to be attached to the the visa form, whether we filled it in Bangkok or Samui. Luckily both of us happened to be carrying mugshots of ourselves in our cabin baggage. Jabeen said, "There's always so much stuff in my handbag that I don't need but leave inside 'just in case'. Well, now all the junk I've carried all these years has proven its worth".

Home Spun and The Skoda Prize

I'm in the middle (or, hopefully, near the end) of a longish period of blogger's block. I have nothing to say about current events that I feel is worth saying, but I don't want to leave this ground fallow any longer. Which is why I'm posting about two events in my professional life, a show I've curated and an art prize I've helped conceive.
The exhibition I've curated, called Home Spun, opened a couple of weeks ago at the Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, which displays work from the Lekha and Anupam Poddar collection. The press has been kind thus far. Here are previews / reviews from Anindita Ghose in Mint; Karanjeet Kaur in Time Out; Manjula Narayan in Friday Gurgaon; and Chitra Narayanan in the Hindu Business Line.
The show runs till 27 December and, if you're in Gurgaon before then, on a day which is not a Monday or public holiday, please consider dropping in to take a look.
I'm an advisor to the Skoda Prize for Contemporary Art, an annual award for Indian artists under forty-five which is now in its second year. We had the first jurors' meet for the current year in Delhi last week, and cut the 128 entries down to a longlist of twenty. These shows will feature in a catalogue, to be released at the opening of the Skoda Prize Show at the Lalit Kala Akademi on January 23, 2012. On October 24, 2011, the four member jury will be joined by Heike Munder, curator of Zurich's Migros Museum, to narrow the selection down to a three-person shortlist. The final selection will happen after viewing the Skoda Prize Show, and the award of Rs 10 lakh will be presented on January 28, 2012. The two runners' up receive a four-week residency in Switzerland courtesy Pro Helvetia.
Take a look at the list and let me know if you have any favourites, and if you think somebody was unfairly excluded or included. And here's a look back at the inaugural award ceremony, where Anish Kapoor presented the trophy to Mithu Sen.

The new Yahoo! Mail sucks

Two weeks ago, I switched to the new Yahoo! Mail that is supposed to take on Google, and I'm regretting it bitterly. The Search function works maybe one time out of ten; and I need search desperately because of a personal quirk: I don't maintain a contacts list or an address book. It's silly, I know, but I fear sending out a virus to friends through the account. The only way to prevent this from happening, as far as I can tell, is not to have a folder of addresses that the virus can access.
Absent an address book, I depend on the Search function to help me out every day. Without it, I'm left trawling through 14000 mails seeking the addresses I need. It's been a nightmare because I've had to send out invites to dozens of people for an event in Delhi tomorrow. Luckily Facebook's functioning well. Small mercies.
Back when I worked in a dotcom, Yahoo! was what every website aspired to be. Now we ask how the company could ever have been a dominant force in tech, the way we wonder how Britain ever managed to rule the world.

Cops and robbers: dumb and dumber

Early this month, my sister Renuka's Mitsubishi Pajero was stolen from her building's compound. A compound ought to be secure, but for some reason this one has a gate at the back. The guard was hanging out, or napping, at the front door while thieves managed to break into the car and drive it out the back gate.
By the time the robbery was discovered at least five hours had passed and the thieves could easily have been at the state's border. It was pretty devastating. Renuka and my brother-in-law Ashutosh filed a complaint, but the police said a professional gang had been targetting Pajeros for four years and chances of the SUV being found were slim.
Then, a week ago, Renuka received a call from Jalpaiguri police station saying they had her car. Jalpaiguri is on the Nepal / Bhutan border, so the thieves apparently aimed to drive it right out of India. They'd crossed a dozen states seemingly without hassle, but were stopped in West Bengal by cops who felt they didn't appear to have the means to be driving an SUV. They asked the men, one Nepali, one Bihari, for their papers, which were not in order. They searched the car and found, wait for it, the car's original license plates in the dickey. Guys who couldn't throw out license plates were unlikely to have erased chassis numbers. The police traced the Mitsubishi dealer through the vehicle identification number; the dealer gave them my sister's contact. And so it was that, out of the blue, Renuka got a call that lifted the depression which had hung about her house for two weeks.
Maybe the thieves believed they could bribe their way out of any tough spot. Maybe the police were more alert and more honest because West Bengal's administration has just changed after 34 years of Communist rule. Whatever the story behind their arrest, it was very nice of the robbers to preserve evidence of their crime, and to keep it in the first place anybody would look.
The car hasn't actually been returned yet. After impounding it, the Jalpaiguri police asked for the original FIR to be faxed to them. The Versova cops reluctantly agreed to do it, but then forgot, or decided that helping to convict criminals was not part of their job description. Finally, Ashutosh faxed his own copy of the complaint, and that should hopefully do the trick.

The Central Bureau of Investigation has shown the world exactly how incompetent it is by making public a list of terrorists and criminals it claims are being sheltered by Pakistan, only for the media to discover one fearsome militant hanging out in a suburb of Bombay, and another lodged in Arthur Road jail. No doubt more of the missing terrorists will soon be found in plain sight. When I read stories like this, I wonder how police manage to catch any criminals at all. Well, the story of my sister's car indicates that, if our cops are dumb, our thieves are often dumber.

Hindustan Times: Thanks for the virus

I stay away from Indian newspaper sites as much as I can because of the intrusive ads they use, but can't avoid them completely. So ,this morning, a link from Google News took me to the Hindustan Times website; about five seconds later, I got a virus alert. I hit 'Heal' on the virus guard and thought I'd caught it. I was mistaken. I found I couldn't access any files on the machine because, ostensibly, a disk defragmentation was required. I've seen that kind of thing before: run the defrag and it eventually says there's a problem with the system and only buying HDD Plus (the malware in question) will solve it.

The last virus that attacked my machine came from the Indian Railways online reservation system. That was particularly infuriating because it's a site that generates revenues through ticket sales and has no business foisting bank loan ads on clients.

Luckily I'm not in the middle (or worse, near the end) of a long article with an urgent deadline. Also, I use a wireless modem that allows me to surf from my laptop. Small mercies.

Bulbs and ovens

About two years ago, we began switching all our bulbs to CFL. Everytime a bulb popped, we'd replace it with one considered more environmentally friendly. Today, the first CFL bulb flickered and died. Two years seems like a pretty good run, but considering these lights are seven times the price of normal ones, I doubt if it makes economic sense to use them.
Having said that, I was very annoyed by the frequency with which the standard bulbs had begun to blow. I thought there was an issue with the wiring, which is why the CFL test was important; it proved it was the bulbs and not the wires that were dodgy.
Did light bulbs always die so early? Or are they just not making them as well as they used to? There are just so many products now that seem built to malfunction in short order: printers, DVD players, washing machines, not to mention small things like faucets. Then there are services that keep breaking down: satellite TV, broadband, stuff like that. There seems always something in the house that isn't working the way it should do.
I suppose I shouldn't be nostalgic about the old days; partly because one simply didn't notice things going wrong when one was a child, since that was someone else's responsibility; partly because there were far fewer appliances in homes, and that's not a state to which I wish to return; and partly because government services were poor enough to leave indelible memories: telephones that went dead at crucial times, gas cylinders that didn't arrive for weeks after they were ordered.
There are, however, some products that force one to exclaim, "They just don't build them like that any more". My favourite is the Belling oven. Tens of thousands of Indians travelled to England after independence, and every single one of them returned with a Belling.




One sees them in a number of homes fifty or sixty years later, still working, though perhaps not as efficiently as they did when brand new. Our Belling was replaced by a BPL Sanyo over a decade ago, but sits in a corner of the kitchen, used to brown pie crusts which don't acquire the perfect colour in the newer machine; and for simple tasks like grilling cheese toast.

The Tata Sky saga continues

Around August 15, I made a complaint saying certain channels like CNN and BBC were no longer playing on my Tata Sky connection. I was told there were some issues with these channels, things would be sorted out in a day or two. A few days later I called to ask when things would be sorted out. The person speaking to me had never heard of BBC and CNN. Eventually, he took a complaint of a general nature. There was no follow up from Tata Sky.
Five days later I called to complain once more. This time, I was given an assurance of action within 72 hours. About 72 hours later, a man appeared, examined the cables, said they were full of water and would need to be replaced. He promised to come the next day. He disappeared.
Four days later, I called TataSky again, asking why the cable guy hadn't returned. My problem would be addressed in 72 hours, I was assured. 72 hours later, a different repairer arrived. I wasn't in Bombay at the time. He did some work for half an hour and left. When I returned, I found one of the two TV sets in the home working fine, while the other had no signal at all.
So I called Tata Sky again. They promised to send a man. Nobody arrived. I called again and spoke to a senior. She apologised and said she would check about why nobody had come. An hour later a woman called from the local office, saying the delay was because of the auto rickshaw strike. The man would definitely come the next morning.
He finally arrived at 4pm yesterday. He looked at the cables, said they were full of water and needed replacing. I said that's what the first guy had said. He didn't have the cable with him, so he'd definitely come the next day to do the job. I said that's what the first guy had said.
I'm waiting to see if the latest promise is kept.

Update, Friday September 10: Three more days of the same old thing. The man didn't return, I have spoken to three more Tata Sky executives and three more of their seniors, all of whom promised to tackle the problem immediately.
Finally, the engineer who had last visited my house called, only to say he was having trouble procuring cable and would therefore not be able to help.
Right now, the Tata Sky customer service number I've been calling for three weeks, 18604256633, seems not to be functional. I get an MTNL woman on the line saying the number does not exist.

The Return of Old Spice

The first fragrance I used regularly was Old Spice. There wasn’t an option in those days. You either applied no aftershave at all, or you applied Old Spice. The brand’s advertisements played regularly on television, featuring bronzed, square jawed surfers; and the crescendo from Carmina Burana’s O Fortuna. I was aware that, in the wider world, Old Spice was an unfashionable brand. A Billy Joel record I possessed had him singing of taking his old man’s Trojans and Old Spice aftershave. If Billy Joel’s dad used Old Spice it couldn’t possibly be cool. My dad used it as well, and a similar conclusion could be drawn from that fact. In any case, how hip could a product be that had ‘old’ in its name?
I’m gobsmacked, therefore, that Old Spice has made a comeback. It's all thanks to a series of advertisements that have gone viral on the Web. The clever original spot, for Old Spice shower gel, cannily took aim at the notion that such products are for girlie men. It also targetted women, because surveys showed they were the ones buying stuff like shower gel for husbands and boyfriends.
Here’s a long interview about how the commercial was made.

Thank you, Tata, thank you, Murdoch

Tony Greig has a favourite line when a cricket ball needs changing during a One Day International: "We can send a man to the moon, but we can't keep a white ball white".
I'm reminded of it whenever the signal goes of on my TV set, as has happened with great frequency in recent days. Why is it so difficult for satellite transmission to work while it's raining? I'd have thought this basic problem would have been sorted out before Direct to Home telecasts were cleared by regulators.
At first, TataSky tried to evade the issue; they insisted that service was only affected when raindrops of a certain millimetrical width came down, which only happened in 1% of showers or something. Finally they caved in and added the line you see at the bottom of the screen: "In case of heavy rain, please wait till the rain subsides to regain signal". OK, thanks, I guess I'll just watch the replay of the World Cup final then.
Wait till the rain subsides? It's the monsoon, the rain will not subside till bloody September. Besides, as anybody with a TataSky connection knows (I presume subscribers to other DTH services face the same problem, but I'm not sure) the breakdown of service does not follow a predictable pattern. The signal is sometimes lost in a drizzle, while at other times the telecast remains crystal clear through a heavy downpour.
I'd go back to my previous cable connection, but now I'm addicted to the additional information DTH provides, specially the programme listing. It's unthinkable now to switch on the telly and have no way of knowing which film is playing.

Poker in Goa

I’m back from a three day poker trip, and sort of rested, although the ground still moves under my feet every now and then. That’s to be expected after sitting through three straight nights in the bottom deck of a floating casino.
Along with about twenty of the players who travelled to Goa for the India Poker Championship, I opted to stay at the local Ginger, part of the Tata Group’s budget business hotel venture modelled on chains like Ibis and Holiday Inn Express. Ginger offers a good deal for single travellers, unlike other hotels in Goa that shave just 10 or 15 percent off their double occupancy rate. Rooms are clean and neatly designed, the aircon and plumbing work, and breakfast is included. On the downside, the Wi-Fi rate is extortionate, at over 100 rupees and hour, and coverage is pretty bad in the rooms. I took my laptop along, but preferred to stroll across to a cybercafe to blog and check my email.
I was surprised to see a number of holidaying families staying at the hotel, a sterile building within the most sterile precinct in all Goa. Last time I was there, during the previous IPC in March, I even noticed a honeymooning couple at breakfast. Makes me wonder what experience such people are looking for when they come to Goa. It isn’t the beaches, booze and nightlife; it isn’t the atmospheric lanes of Fontainhas and the architecture of Old Goa; it isn’t the lush landscape of palms, cashews and paddy fields. What, then, draws them to the state?
The draw for me this time was poker and nothing but poker. The rest of this post will concentrate on that, and will sound like Greek to those unfamiliar with the game. You have been warned.


I didn’t suffer any huge bad beats like I had last time round. In fact, during one cash game, I hit a set of queens to crack pocket aces. It’s just that I didn’t win coin flips when I most needed to. During the 10K tourney I had pocket 5s against my friend Sam Rattonsey’s AK offsuit; we both had medium stacks, but the blinds were getting uncomfortable. I pushed from the button and of course he called from the small blind. He hit a king and went on to place first, which made me glad he’d won that hand and not I.
I played a few interesting hands in the late stages of the 20K tourney.
Hand 1:
I’d built my stack to 15000 when the blinds were 300 / 600. Under the gun, I was dealt pocket queens and raised to 1800. A guy in middle position reraised to 5000. He was on tilt a bit because he’d split a pot holding aces against pocket tens, all chips in pre-flop, when the board showed a spade flush and neither player held a spade. Still, I felt I was probably beat, putting him on kings, with a small chance I was racing against AK. If he had kings, all his money was almost certain to go in on the flop. If I hit a set of queens, I would definitely double up. I was getting about 6 to 1 implied odds, which didn’t justify a call when the odds were 7.5 to 1 against hitting that set. I called mainly because I had to factor in the possibility that he had AK. A queen did show up on the flop, and I did double up, and was in a pretty strong position at that point with 30K chips.

Hand 2:
I was in the big blind, still at 30,000 odd, with the blinds at 1000 / 2000 and about fifteen players left. Chap in early position limped, as did the short stacked small blind. My hand was A 10. The limper, whose name was also Girish, had about 11,000 left over. I’d been at the same cash table with him the previous night, and knew his style well. He was, basically, the biggest calling station I have seen in my life. He paid me off a number of times, but his most remarkable calls were against other players. One time, he called a preflop raise, a bet on the flop, and an all-in bet on the turn with K Q, having hit neither card, and having no draw. Another time, he called someone down to the river and called a huge river bet with just ace high. So basically I knew I was getting a call from him. I figured A 10 was good and pushed. He called with K Q and rivered a queen. I lost about half my stack in that hand.

Hand 3:
The very next hand, a player from my Bombay group, Masood, shoved with about 15,000 from middle position. I was in the small blind and again had A 10. I felt Masood was weak, and was hoping he had A 9 or A 8, which would make me a 7 : 3 favourite; in any case I was sure I was ahead and called. He showed K Q, which meant I was a 6 : 4 favourite like in the previous hand. Unfortunately, he turned a queen, and left me with just one small blind worth of chips, which lasted four more hands before I was eliminated.

It’s been six IPC events without a cash, which is a bit frustrating. Luckily my success at the cash game tables allowed me to more than cover my buy-ins for all those events, plus travel and accommodation expenses.

Quote, unquote, misquote

In my college days, my mother, a writer, and my actress sister would regularly be asked for quotes for some newspaper article or other. Almost invariably, a mangled version of what they’d said would appear in print, leaving them fuming. They’re still generous with quotes, but I decided early on not to get into that charade. Nobody is too unimportant to be misquoted, I told myself.
At some point, I began to be asked for my views about contemporary art. I’d try and compensate for refusing to speak on record by providing background information about the subject, or pointing to published writing of mine that could be used in the context. Finally, last month, figuring my lecture on masculinity could do with some publicity, I agreed to an email interview for Time Out. The writer accepted my condition about carrying answers without alteration.
Emboldened by that experience, I wondered if I hadn’t been too absolute about the issue. After all, I’ve written dozens of pieces which wouldn’t have been possible without the co-operation of people willing to be quoted. So I provided written quotes for three different articles in the course of a week. The first appeared in the Times of India’s Crest edition a few days ago. The question posed by Saloni Doshi was, "Do you feel that many of our galleries have taken the role of a museum in terms of delivering museum quality shows or retrospectives etc?" I answered: "When private galleries have mounted retrospectives or memorable group shows, it has usually been within a museum like the NGMA. The Bhupen Khakhar retrospective and Chemould gallery's 40th anniversary show come to mind. I have seen few museum quality shows within the limited space of a private gallery."
The published version reads, “I have seen a few museum quality shows (in Mumbai) within the limited space of a private gallery — the Bhupen Khakhar retrospective and Chemould’s 40th anniversary are the few that come to mind,” comments art critic Girish Shahane".
The added ‘a’ entirely changes the meaning of what I’d written. Now I’m rethinking the whole speaking on record stuff. I’ll wait for the other two pieces to be published before deciding whether to crawl back into quote hibernation.
Although this is the first quote I have provided for publication, it isn’t the first to have appeared in print. Two years ago, a guy named Rahul Jayaram quoted me in an article about a Dante manuscript in Bombay’s Asiatic Library. Only problem was, I had never met or spoken to Rahul Jayaram in my life. He probably thought he’d get away because the article was printed in Calcutta’s Telegraph newspaper; he hadn’t reckoned with Google Alerts.
I tracked him down, and he apologised, but the article remains online, with this quote by me, which is entirely nonsensical in the context: Art critic Girish Shahane concurs. “An abstract artist like Harold Shapinsky was discovered by literature professor Akumal Ramachander when the latter visited his house in New York in the 1980s. Shapinsky was unheard of then,” he says.
As far as I can tell, the British expert quoted throughout the article doesn't exist. In which case, why couldn't Rahul Jayaram make up a fictitious art critic as well? Why me? And why Harold Shapinsky? There are a number of things I will go a lifetime without understanding, and this is one of them.

Diamonds are not forever

I received a disturbing letter from the Warden of Rhodes House yesterday. "To be blunt: the Rhodes Scholarships need your financial support," it read (bold type in the original). Anybody who needs my financial support, I thought, is in grave trouble indeed. Luckily for the trust, the letter went out to all former Scholars, many of whom are better equipped to help.
The question is: how did the Rhodes Trust come to this pass? After all, the bequest of Cecil Rhodes had sufficed to fund scholarships to Oxford University for a hundred years, surviving stock market crashes, stagflation and world wars. I glanced at the Trust's accounts, which indicated it had lost a third of its capital in the 2008 meltdown.
The problem has its roots, I believe, in the formation in 2003 of the Rhodes-Mandela Foundation. The idea was that, since the benefactor Cecil Rhodes was a nasty imperialist who had become one of the world's richest men by exploiting the diamonds and gold of southern Africa, the trust owed a special debt to that region. A total sum of 10 million pounds was promised by the Rhodes Trustees to the Rhodes-Mandela Foundation, to be paid over 10 years and matched by an equal amount raised from other sources.
This gift added, annually, about 20% to the trust's expenses, at a time when university fees were rising sharply for non-EU students. The trustees, under the leadership of William Waldegrave, felt the need to increase revenues to compensate. They switched, in 2004, to 'total return' investing, which, from what I can understand, means shifting from fixed-income bonds, and companies that pay substantial dividends (typically, firms in mature, slow-growth industries), to high-growth assets. High growth, of course, comes with high risk. The 'total return' strategy was dandy for three years, struggled for a year after that, and hit a wall in 2008. As far as I can tell, the Rhodes Trust sold most of its holdings near the bottom of the market, and was sitting on cash through the recovery that kicked in after March 2009.
So now they're asking for bequests and donations. They've rejigged the board of trustees, inducting, among others, Narayana Murthy. But William Waldegrave is still Chairman, something I find astonishing. He's a former Tory minister, and Vice Chairman of the Investment Banking Department and Chairman of the European Financial Institutions Group at UBS Investment Bank. No wonder the Trust almost went broke under his watch, that CV reads to me like a recipe for disaster.

Body and Soul

The first public lecture I ever gave involved a lot of Picasso. At one point in the talk, I conveyed what a materialist the Spanish painter was through an example from his teenage years. He had drawn the Holy Family resting during their escape to Egypt, and sketched a cloudy mass above. A friend asked him if it represented the Holy Spirit. Picasso replied, "Holy Spirit! It's a date palm. They needed to eat something, didn't they?"
I'd put the anecdote in to amuse those in the audience who might've been getting bored by that point, but the story had a strange effect. The round of questions and comments that commenced 30 minutes later went something like this:
"Do you really think Picasso had no spiritual side?"
"Don't you think all art is spiritual?"
"Who, according to you, would be a spiritual modern painter?"
"Would you classify De Kooning as spiritual?"
Then a succession of artist names with the spirit question appended.

Yesterday's lecture was a bit of deja vu. Speaking of masculinity, I stuck exclusively to issues concerning the male body. The body in painting, the body in advertising, the body on the sports field, body body body.

The first question was, "Actually, according to science, we are all women, since we all have X chromosomes, right? So those who say Indians are less masculine are only saying we are closer to our genes and to spirituality."
I saw no way I could possibly respond to this, so I asked for the next comment, which was:
"With the incursion of Islam, we have the introduction of the gendered soul into the sub-continent, whereas Indic tradition has no conception of the soul as gendered; this shift creates a crisis of masculinity."
I said I had no idea the soul was gendered in Islam.
There followed a discussion about Christian souls, the number of Quranic heavens and what they signified, the gender of Brahman in the Upanishads and so on.
Next time I think I'll clarify in advance, "Please don't ask me about souls or spirituality. Even when I show an image of the Buddha, I'm only interested in his body".

My friend Goodwin

Housemates from 7, Fyfield Road. Standing, left to right: Henrietta Kaninda (Zaire); Me; Rick Russell (USA); Evelyn Tait (Scotland); Sitting, l to r: Jeff Moore (Canada); Dean Hickman (England); Goodwin Liu (USA); Beate Dignas (Germany); Patrick Callaghan (Irish Republic).

I was out of town with limited web access for four days, but managed to check Google News one afternoon, and was delighted to read that Goodwin Liu, my closest friend from my grad student days, has been nominated to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The Courts of Appeals are roughly the equivalent of India's High Courts.
Goodwin came to Oxford to study PPP (Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology), after a degree in biology from Stanford, and seemed headed for a career in medicine, following his parents and older brother. He found himself drawn more to the social sciences and, after a bout of the soul searching to which he was prone, switched to PPE (Politics, Philosophy and Economics), and busied himself with deciphering Locke and Hume.
We lived in adjoining quarters, and spent long periods in each others’ company. Most of the time it was I hanging out in his room, because it was hospitably done up, while mine resembled a cavern. I was a pretty good cook, and Goodwin an exceptional one. However, while I was often content to scramble a few eggs with Gouda or head for the college dining hall, he’d make full meals each day, usually a preparation of rice, vegetables and strips of pork stewed in flavourful stock, accompanied by a side dish like broccoli with oyster sauce. He was generous sharing what he cooked, as also everything in his kitchen cabinet. An exception was made in the case of chocolate products, once Goodwin discovered I tended to scarf huge quantities of these. He might feel like a chocolate covered Jaffa cake at midnight and discover the entire pack he’d bought the previous day was gone, with the Indian next door the lone suspect.
We talked a lot about politics, and have continued those discussions through letters and emails after leaving England, although our exchanges become less frequent each year. Having a fair insight into the way Goodwin’s mind works, I’ve been astonished to read the attacks on him after his nomination. Conservative critics have called him "a hard-Left ideologue", "one of the leading radical legal theorists out there", and "far outside the mainstream of American jurisprudence". On blogger wrote, "It is shocking that President Obama would nominate an extremist like Goodwin Liu, who expresses outright hostility to the most fundamental principles of our democracy, to the federal bench".
Unlike in India, where judicial appointments are made by a collegium without political intervention, federal judges in the US are nominated by the President and have to go through a confirmation process. This leads to partisan debates around the faultlines of US politics: affirmative action, abortion, gun control etc. Since it is difficult to fault Goodwin’s qualifications (Stanford, Oxford, Yale Law School, clerking for a Supreme Court judge, professor of law at Berkeley), conservatives are painting him as sympathetic to the far Left. I know this isn’t true because, back in University, I was a far Left ideologue of sorts, and Goodwin’s position was clearly very different, more or less that of a conventional coastal Democrat.
It wasn't what he believed that was interesting, however, so much as how he thought about issues. He was never summarily dismissive either of my Chomskian take on US foreign policy, or the perspective of another close friend of his, Micul, a moderate Republican whose critique of affirmative action had been moulded by Shelby Steele and Stephen Carter. I’ve rarely come across anyone as respectful as Goodwin of views opposed to or different from his own. If the common sense belief is valid that the two qualities most required in a judge are that he should be knowledgeable and that he should give both sides a fair hearing, Goodwin is a perfect choice for the post to which he’s been nominated.
When Jabeen and I first visited the US, Goodwin hosted us in San Francisco. The day we left the city, he offered to drive us to the airport early in the morning before going back home, dressing for work and heading to office (I think he was working for a private law firm at the time). Once at the airport, he got off to help us with our baggage, and I, out of habit, locked the passenger door before shutting it. In the US, I discovered, this has the effect of locking the entire car. When Goodwin tried to get in, he found himself shut out.
“Did you lock the door?” he asked.
“Well, yes, that’s what we do in India”, I said sheepishly.
He had a number for some insurance firm, and said he’d call it while we checked in. When we returned five minutes later, a man was using a slim jim on the car door. I was probably more relieved than Goodwin that things had been quickly sorted out. He waved goodbye and, against a background of patiently listening to dozens of my US foreign policy harangues, allowed himself a patriotic parting shot.
“You know, Girish, this is why I like the United States.”


A stressed Goodwin, probably trying to get an assignment done on time.

The Indian Art Summit

I'm back after spending the 21st and 22nd at the second Indian Art Summit in Delhi. The atmosphere was upbeat throughout, with the occasional shift to frantic. Dealers seemed pretty happy with the sales as well as new contacts they made among the 40,000 or so who thronged Pragati Maidan over the four days the art was on display.
I was invited to chair one session and speak in another at a conference accompanying the art fair. The organisers were a little overambitious, stuffing the programme with more speakers than it could comfortably hold. I didn't mind having my slot reduced to 15 minutes, but the squeeze was unfair to some foreign invitees.
For maximum effect, I took on one of the holiest cows of modern critical theory, the work of Walter Benjamin, in arguing that art writing and curation today concerns itself too much with politics. Following the principle of shoot first, mumble later, I thought I'd clarify and modify my position during question time, but no questions were forthcoming.
I've taken to checking weather websites before any travel, and they all forecast heavy rain for Delhi the day I landed. Our Met departments, which follow an interpretative strategy all their own, had failed to spot the coming showers. The capital isn't equipped for downpours, and the streets soon flooded, as did access roads to the art fair venue and a couple of rooms within, though luckily not the main exhibition halls. Pragati Maidan forbids private cars from crossing its main gate, and a shuttle had been arranged to take visitors the final 200 meters. Unfortunately, a lake formed between the car park and the shuttle stop. Visitors had to walk through knee-deep water to get to the minibus, and repeat the process while returning to their vehicles after being dropped off.
Since I hadn't got much sleep the night before my 6am flight to Delhi, I thought I'd turn in early and wake up fresh to rework my paper. As my head touched the pillow in my room at the Indian Islamic Cultural Centre, a twanging noise began next door, in the backyard of the India International Centre Annexe. It was the start of a weird new age electronic fusion concert that kept me awake for another 90 minutes.
Speaking of weird, the Islamic Centre is weird. The foundation stone was laid by Indira Gandhi the year she died, 1984, and the place was inaugurated by Sonia Gandhi 22 years later. It was funded by a mix of state, private and foreign donors, whose names appear on a plaque near the reception. Much of the space is given over to lodgings beginning to show signs of wear -- stains on carpets, doors that won't latch and so on -- but the building has delusions of grandeur, boasting an Iranian dome of glazed blue tiles which covers a rotunda that's entirely bare apart from a fancy staircase curving along its side. Ramzan began the last day I was in the capital, and the coffee shop opened at 3.30am in response, but the religious presence was pretty muted otherwise. There wasn't even a mihrab in my room. Come to think of it, I didn't notice any pointer to the direction of Mecca in the hotels we stayed at during our Iran-Syria holiday.
The Art Summit is the brainchild of Neha Kirpal, who works for the PR firm Hanmer MS&L. Neha had little connection with the art world before she thought up the idea, but obviously knew a lot about event management. She and the Hanmer team have created an exhibition that is already, in its second year, the biggest of its kind in India.

The Military and Non-Violence

The launch of India's first nuclear-powered submarine, INS Arihant, reminded me of an embarrassing moment from the past. I was in a city outside Bombay and needed to meet a high ranking naval officer for some work. I spoke about him to a couple of acquaintances, both of whom immediately said, "Oh him, he's on the nuclear submarine project". As I sat making small talk with the officer a few hours later, I casually asked, "So how is the work on the nuclear submarine proceeding? Is it likely to be functional any time soon?" He looked flabbergasted. "Who told you I was working on that?" he asked. I realised that, not only was the project supposed to be a carefully guarded secret, but that, until that moment, the officer had believed his official position as overseer of certain civil contracts was taken seriously. I hemmed and hawed, mumbling I couldn't remember who, precisely, had mentioned the nuclear sub, and changed the subject.
I hope the officer was present at the commissioning of Arihant the other day.
Arihant means 'destroyer of enemies'. A fair enough name for a submarine, you would think. But there's a catch. The word is used in Jain tradition to refer to certain enlightened souls who have, to mix religious terminology a bit, triumphed in the Greater Jihad against hatred and personal egotism. Jainism happens to be the most militantly non-violent faith in the world, if that phrase isn't an oxymoron. In the past, when Jains became prime ministers or high officials, and had to get involved in warfare, they atoned for their sins by endowing temples. The lavish marble monuments of Mount Abu were constructed from these endowments. Jains, literally, would not hurt a fly. Many go out of their way to try and protect insects, wearing masks so as not breathe the critters in, and sweeping the ground before their feet with peacock feathers to brush off any unfortunate beetle who might be chilling in the danger zone.
Many Gujarati Jains, it must be said, have been less than true to their ideals during the reign of Narendra Modi, but that's a separate issue. The issue, right now, is INS Arihant, and Jains are displeased that their prophets have been associated with a machine of destruction.
It must be difficult for the military establishment to cope with all the pacifist traditions we have in our country, but sometimes the brass seem to miss obvious points of conflict. Like, India's first nuclear test, conducted in 1974, was codenamed The Smiling Buddha. A number of commentators have since suggested it was unwise to connect history's most profound teacher of non-violence with the most horrendously destructive device conceived by humankind.
Not that India admitted its interest in stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. The Smiling Buddha was classified as a Peaceful Nuclear Explosion. That seems like the oxymoron to end all oxymorons, but there's actually a treaty governing such tests, because at one time scientists believed nuclear weapons could be of help in building dams and canals. India's own military ambitions used that convenient cloak in 1974.
In 1998, the cloak was thrown off, all pretense came to an end. The Buddha smiled again, they said, of the five tests conducted that year. I doubt he did.