Shadow Warrior by Rajeev Srinivasan

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A version of this essay was published by thepamphlet.in at https://www.thepamphlet.in/en/shadow-warrior-a-deplorable-supreme-court-decision-on-demonetization/

The Supreme Court, in a 4:1 judgment, held that the 2016 Demonetization was acceptable. The dissenting judge, well, dissented, saying that it was flawed. This decision sets an awful precedent that will come back to haunt us all, and the judiciary is respectful of precedent. The law of unintended consequences will strike.

It is not that demonetization per se was a bad idea, or that it was executed poorly, or that its goals were not met. It was a pretty good idea, it was executed moderately well, and the declared goals, to reduce corruption, terror funding through counterfeit notes, and to increase the proportion of ‘white’ money in circulation, were met to an extent. 

No, the problem is twofold: one, an unprecedented and unwarranted level of judicial overreach and encroachment into the domain of the Executive; two, the common sense principle of fait accompli: this is a done deal, and it is essentially impossible to undo it. 

The point is that the judiciary has its role, which is in hair-splitting legal jargon and in particular the verbiage of the Constitution. With all due respect, judges are not trained in other disciplines, and would be hard-pressed to understand economics, or engineering, or medicine, or military affairs. They simply will not be able to make judicious decisions (to give them credit, the majority opinion did concede this). But then, they should not take up such cases in the first place. 

I can imagine motivated petitioners waiting in the wings to now ask the Supreme Court to undo the 1971 Bangladesh War, the decision to impose covid-related mandates, or the Mangalyaan space probe. In fact, you could find somebody to make a cogent argument that the Constitution should not have been accepted in 1950, and that it should be rolled back. 

There is no end to such litigation, and if it is allowed to proliferate, it would clog up the entire judiciary. Of course, the entire judiciary is already clogged up with 30 million cases, so why open the flood-gates and invite more frivolous litigation?

As for the law of unintended consequences, there is the recent experience of the Democrats in the US. After years of claiming ex-President Trump’s tax returns would reveal deep, dark secrets, they forced him to reveal them: and it was a damp squib, with nothing of significance, no tax evasion. But the precedent has been set, and the Republicans will now use this to harass every Democrat alleging skeletons in their tax closets. 

The Indian Supreme Court should stick to its fundamental task: interpreting the Constitution. Not being a lawyer, I cannot say authoritatively that there is no constitutional issue in the anti-demonetization lawsuit, but I doubt it. It is a purely administrative issue, and thus the domain of the Executive, just as making a multitude of daily decisions is. 

The activist Indian courts have long been accused of interfering in everything while at the same time creating cozy little fiefdoms for themselves, for instance in the continuous creation of post-retirement sinecures for judges, the most recent being the demand that retired judges should be on the committee choosing the Chief Election Commissioner.

The most obvious example of bad faith is the judiciary’s closed and opaque Collegium system, wherein they nominate and appoint themselves, with the predictable result of nepotism and hereditary elites. It is high time that Parliament put a stop to this, and created new laws that mandate a role for the Executive. The proposed NJAC could be one way forward. If the NJAC is unconstitutional, well then, bring in a constitutional amendment. 

Many people have talked about judicial reforms; I too took a stab at it a few years ago (“Can we fix the deeply troubled judiciary?” Swarajya, May 2018). One of my points was the radical restructuring of the system into a Supreme Court that only hears constitutional cases, and a new set of regional Courts of Appeal, with status almost equivalent to the Supreme Court, that hear other things beyond the ken of state High Courts. 

There is a serious concern about which cases the Supreme Court chooses to hear. At the moment, it appears whimsical. Why on earth would the SC hear cases about cricket, which is a mere entertainment? Why on earth would the SC not hear petitions about the 1990s ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Hindus (it has refused to do so three times already).

The terror onslaught in Jammu and Kashmir is not history. We saw with horror the terrorist attack on Hindus in Jammu’s Rajouri just days ago, where the attackers reportedly identified Hindus by their Aadhar cards, and then shot them. This is an urgent, ongoing problem, and why does the court refuse to hear it, while at the same time accepting a case on the 1948 assassination of Mahatma Gandhi? Next, someone will file a PIL demanding the undoing of that assassination.

Why does the SC accept PILs (Public Interest Litigations) put up by motivated NGOs, often with foreign funding? These people are able to get, through the back door, rapid decisions that affect the entire country, whereas the cases should properly be heard at the local level in District Courts, and only be elevated to the Supreme Court through a proper process if they actually have merit.

Apart from this, some actions are virtually impossible to undo: time and tide wait for no man. How could the SC, like King Canute who ordered the waves to retreat, even possibly consider the undoing of demonetization? How will it be done? What about the major moves in digitization that resulted, the UPI revolution, the trillions of rupees flowing through a payment system that is now ubiquitous and available to anyone with a mobile phone?

India has now become one of the most digitally connected countries in the world, but the amount of cash in the system is now even greater than at the time of demonetization. Can the court explain why? So it is not as though cash suddenly disappeared. Yes, there was a temporary crunch, and yes, it was hardship for many, but on average, most people have recovered.

Malign NGOs have continually opposed national interests: remember Sterlite? Or the Sardar Sarovar dam? By accepting a plea that was clearly inappropriate, probably politically motivated, and in any case something that would be virtually impossible to undo, the Supreme Court has set a poor precedent. 

The Indian judiciary acts as a law unto itself, unaccountable to anybody else. This is wrong. As the President and the Vice President mentioned recently, it is time the judiciary reformed itself. I suspect it will have to be done forcibly, not voluntarily.

1090 words, 3 Jan 2023

A version of this essay was published by firstpost.com at https://www.firstpost.com/world/ftx-saga-and-many-implosions-in-us-especially-in-big-tech-11709111.html

Elizabeth Holmes, the formerly celebrated founder of Theranos, got hit with a jail term of 11 years, according to the Wall Street Journal. That was a startling end to what looked at one time like a huge Silicon Valley success story.

But it was not the only Big Tech or big company story. The following stories also come from the WSJ:

Along with these, there have been stories about massive layoffs: Meta axes 13% of its workforce, or about 11,000 people; Amazon lays off 10,000 staff, mostly those in core areas such as engineering and marketing; and Google (Alphabet) is under pressure from activist investor TCI to do much the same for cost-cutting reasons. 

All this may add up to a “techno-winter” (if not a general recession), one might think; surely the “crypto-winter” is already in progress. But is that really true? I believe there are three separate things going on, and it does not make sense to mingle all of them and seek solutions. The first is just plain old-fashioned grift; the second is the normal churn in business models; and the third is whether crypto makes sense.

There are always major scams in the US: examples include Enron, Bernie Madoff, and the Lehman Brothers meltdown. There is the spectacle of supposedly sensible people (e.g. bankers and venture capitalists) being completely bamboozled by a smooth-talking person with a spreadsheet, with the result that lots of investor’s (and taxpayers’) money goes down the drain.

Elizabeth Holmes seems to have hoodwinked the whos-who of not only Silicon Valley’s VCs, but also name-brand politicians and captains of industry and got them on her board of directors. I mean, George Schulz and Henry Kissinger: it doesn’t get any bigger than this. Exactly what did these luminaries see in the company? Some earth-shaking vision, I suppose. 

To be honest, I too wondered if Theranos did have a really disruptive technology that would upend the market for diagnostic blood tests. But after an expose in Bad Blood by a WSJ reporter, it was clear that the company was really a house of cards (see my column on this in Open Magazine, where I explored, among other things, Holmes’ ‘reality distortion field’).

It is now clear that Theranos was a scam built up by Holmes and her then-boyfriend, Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani, a Pakistani-American entrepreneur who was much older than her, who was also president of the company. Holmes got sentenced to 11 years, Balwani got 13. Bernie Madoff, and Jeff Epstein also got long sentences. Bernie Madoff is a champion of sorts, for he ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history: $64 billion.

Now Sam Bankman-Fried is giving Madoff a run for his money. His crypto exchange, FTX, valued at $32 billion just a fortnight ago, is worth virtually nothing at this time, and billions of dollars worth of customers’ money has… disappeared. John Ray III, the lawyer brought in to clean up FTX during bankruptcy proceedings (ironically the same person who did the Enron clean-up), said he couldn’t believe the ‘unprecedented mess’ he found there. 

The point is that despite all the fuss about crypto-currency, it is increasingly evident that Sam Bankman-Fried ran an old-fashioned fraud: “pump and dump”. The crypto bit was merely window-dressing to give sex appeal to the whole gig. And it worked, too. Major investors like the blue-chip VC firm Sequoia Capital were so thoroughly taken in that the purported reactions of their partners is simply astonishing, if true. 

Here’s a screenshot of an alleged Sequoia memo. There’s worse: another tweet purports to show that two partners, a male and a female, reported being sexually aroused on hearing Bankman-Fried’s pitch about FTX’s world-beating vision to control all money (it is too embarrassing and too crude to quote):

Is crypto a scam? Stephen Diehl, author of Popping the Crypto Bubble says so in this interview with the Financial Times. He calls post-2016 crypto the Grifter Era, and that’s not far from the truth. It’s like the carpetbaggers have arrived and set up shop. I am personally of the opinion that crypto may have some value, only that the killer apps haven’t been dreamt up yet; I do believe the underlying blockchains are useful, although successful rollouts and use cases are still too few.

But the point is that the FTX meltdown has relatively little to do with crypto per se. It was just a device to dress up a rather standard, old-fashioned fraud or Ponzi scheme. We have seen this sort of thing going even way back: remember the Dutch Tulip Bubble, and the South Seas Bubble. You have fast-talking hucksters hoodwinking gullible investors, who lose their shirts.

It would be unfair to blame crypto for the greed and indiscipline shown by the FTX founder, or the lack of governance and regulatory control which let insiders essentially loot investor funds. For example, here’s Bankman-Fried and Nishad Singh plundering away:

The other angle that’s remarkable is the fact that the meltdown happened just days after the US midterm elections. Coincidence? Hard to believe, because Sam Bankman-Fried had been a major donor to the Democratic party: he donated some $30 million directly to them, and then perhaps a few hundred million to the ecosystem around the Democratic party, especially the media. Said media then lionized Bankman-Fried beyond all reason, as though he were some messiah.

Once again, the media, sadly, is not covering itself with glory. They didn’t do any investigative journalism; and now that the skeletons are tumbling out of the closet, they should be kicking themselves for having missed out on a juicy story. But the omerta of left-leaning, ideological journalists is a wonder to behold. This is what the WaPo is worried about now? Not fraud?

The ‘effective altruism’ school of thought that SBF (Sam Bankman-Fried’s handle) allegedly espoused is probably another scam, even though it’s dressed up in fashionable ESG and DIE memes.

Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-biggest donor to the Democratic party before the 2022 midterms (George Soros was the biggest). The website Gateway Pundit quoting someone else (ok, they might have a beef with Democrats anyway, so take it with a pinch of salt) paints a staggering picture of SBF’s political and government connections, which is in itself highly suspicious. All this cannot be mere coincidence. 

Did SBF materially affect the midterm election results? I hope the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will launch an investigation. 

Frankly this smells like a Deep State operation. I am sure there is a Ukraine angle as well. 

More generally, is the US business model facing a crisis? 

‘Greed is good’, declared Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Does modern corporate greed have an origin? In this interview with the Stanford Business School, David Gelles, author of The Man Who Broke Capitalism squarely blames ‘Neutron’ Jack Welch of GE for what he claims is a toxic culture of profit at all cost in US corporations. That may or may not be fair to Welch, but anyway slash-and-burn, as well as short-termism and ideological metastasis seem to be the watchwords of many US CEOs these days.

It would be difficult to accuse Elon Musk of seeking undue profit in his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, which probably is worth much less than that sum just weeks after Musk took it over. But the issue there is, as is probably the case with Disney too, that there is too much ideology permeating the firm. Disney’s recently fired CEO was seriously into woke causes. 

What Musk has done is to sweep away the wokeness in Twitter, thereby possibly allowing it to fulfill its purported role of ‘digital town square’. Under the previous dispensation, it had become basically a far-left bubble, because anybody who didn’t fit into their world-view was simply deplatformed, defenestrated, silenced, censored: the very antithesis of Freedom of Speech. 

I published this podcast long ago about how the explicit silencing of TrueIndology was a watershed event in the suppression of online speech in India. Shadow banning, reduction of followers, and other malign acts were common against anybody that the Twitter powers-that-be didn’t consider to fit their views, which in India meant anti-Hindu perspectives. 

Despite all the noise in the media about how Twitter has gone down the drain, it is entirely possible that Musk will not run it into the ground. Advertisers who are now staying away will most likely return. The savage layoffs don’t seem to have materially affected the actual performance of Twitter on the ground, as it were: so was there a lot of waste? Wokes are known to live well off Other People’s Money, as in the very case of FTX (in the Bahamas), per the WSJ.

I am betting that Elon Musk will be able to return Twitter to some semblance of a business model, not run it in the ground. After all, the platform does offer value to its subscribers, even long-suffering shadow-ban victims such as me (I have often found people I’ve never heard of have blocked me: I am apparently on mass-blocking lists) still find it useful.

It is not clear, though, if the ‘greed at all costs’ attitude of US business will survive. It is clear, for instance, that they have surrendered America’s industrial capacity to China in the last 30 years, all in return for short-term profits from the ‘China price’. This is suicidal in the long run, as they are beginning to now realize. There has to be some introspection.

It may be too grand to claim that Western business will now go through a sea-change, a once-in-a-generation shift to something more accountable to national interests. This is especially hard when the Deep State is so ascendant, and its friends in the military-industrial-complex thrive on war in Other People’s Countries.

But these woes are coming at the very time that we are seeing the limits of globalization and to the excesses of Wall Street and Silicon Valley VCs. The US business community, and regulators, should consider FTX and Theranos to be canaries in the coalmine: there are useful lessons in their failures.

1675 words, 22 Nov 2022

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