E D I T O R I A L   P A G E

EDITORIALS

Making same ends meet
TUESDAY'S mini-expansion of the Union Council of Ministers reflects the limited options available to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee for deciding which horse should run which course. The warmth with which Ms Sushma Swaraj embraced Ms Uma Bharti gave photo-journalists the opportunity to present a rather unrealistically rosy picture of the day's proceedings at Rashtrapati Bhavan.

Captivity to continue
TUESDAY brought double trouble for Kannada film icon Rajkumar. In Delhi the Supreme Court blocked the release of 51 TADA detenues thereby virtually prolonging his captivity. In Chennai a confidante of Veerappan pulled out of the negotiation team jeopardising efforts at securing his early release.

OPINION

Diplomacy in Contemporary World
Need to guarantee energy security
by G. Parthasarathy
THE continuing focus on Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism and the Sino-Pakistan nuclear and missile nexus have, among other reasons, led to a lack of adequate attention being paid to what needs to be done to guarantee India’s energy security. 

IN THE NEWS

A seasoned hand from Punjab
THE appointment of Mr Surjit Singh Barnala as the first Governor of Uttaranchal appears to be a happy denouement for all concerned in Akali politics. There is an unmistakable air of give and take among the parties concerned — the Punjab Government and the Centre. Even the Akalis appear to have reconciled themselves to the inclusion of Udham Singh Nagar in the newly created state.

ANALYSIS

Virus to cure heart disease?
From Robin Mckie in London
SCIENTISTS are preparing to infect heart disease patients with genetically engineered viruses. The modified microbes would kickstart the patients’ hearts into manufacturing life-saving proteins and so restore their health, say the researchers.

Coping with crisis of time
By Darshan Singh Maini
I trust, no great theologian or thinker, philosopher or ideologist, writer or artist has, in his feeling for the sublime, resisted the temptation to understand and, in his own way, master the crisis of time.

Making same ends meet

TUESDAY'S mini-expansion of the Union Council of Ministers reflects the limited options available to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee for deciding which horse should run which course. The warmth with which Ms Sushma Swaraj embraced Ms Uma Bharti gave photo-journalists the opportunity to present a rather unrealistically rosy picture of the day's proceedings at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Until the other day both Ms Swaraj and Ms Bharti were giving sleepless nights to the Bharatiya Janata Party leadership. Even after the "young turks" of the BJP have been saddled with ministerial responsibilities Mr Vajpayee cannot claim to have given himself the best team for assisting him in completing the remaining part of the five-year term as head of an extremely unstable government. Although the two ladies have returned as fullfledged Cabinet Ministers, there are other elements in the BJP which may make Mr Vajpayee realise the difference between being an effective Opposition leader and a popular Prime Minister. To be fair only Mr Arun Jaitley deserved the promotion he received by being made Cabinet Minister with additional responsibilities [although the supporters of Mr Arun Shourie may justifiably feel that Mr Vajpayee was not totally fair in recognising the talents of the two Aruns]. Not surprisingly most of the problems he has had to cope with have been created by his own colleagues in the BJP and few by other members of the coalition. The creation of three new states has only added to his problems. Although in the case of Uttaranchal he had little difficulty in promoting Mr Nityanand Swami as the popular choice for the post of Chief Minister. All he had to do was to induct Major-General [retd] B. C. Khanduri as a Minister of State, with independent charge of the Ministry of Transport and Highways, for resolving the Uttaranchal leadership issue.

But Jharkhand is proving to be more than a passing headache for Mr Vajpayee [and to some extent BJP President Bangaru Laxman]. Mr Shibu Soren of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha started the trend of "revolt" when his claim for the post of Chief Minister was firmly rejected even after he allowed Press photographers to click him touching the feet of Mr Vajpayee as a mark of respect for the latter's age and position. Of course, Mr Soren was a part of a non-functional NDA in Bihar. So his storming out of the power-sharing arrangement is not likely to be a major source of worry for the BJP. But the raising of the banner of revolt by Mr Karia Munda, a senior BJP leader from Jharkhand, is a far more serious development. Mr Vajpayee was evidently misled into believing that the Uttaranchal formula may be equally effective in deciding the Jharkhand leadership issue. Mr Babulal Marandi was made to resign as Union Minister of State because the Central leaders found him politically more convenient for taking on the responsibility of the first Chief Minister of Jharkhand. But Mr Munda refused to "do a Khanduri" by not turning up for being sworn in as a Minister of State. The Prime Minister needs to have more competent political advisors than the ones who offered the simple stratagem of making Mr Marandi swap his ministerial berth at the Centre without consulting Mr Munda. The ploy backfired in the face of Mr Vajpayee's advisors. Mr Munda asked a pertinent question to explain his case. He said that "if I am not fit to be Chief Minister, how can I be fit for the job of a Central minister"? He had another reason to do what he has done. He was a Cabinet Minister in the 13-day government of Mr Vajpayee, but was considered worthy of being made only a junior minister in what would have been his second innings at the Centre. There is another "if" the BJP leadership should be prepared to cope with. If Mr Munda, who is 20 years senior to Mr Marandi, walks out of the BJP and strikes a deal with Mr Soren [who has already secured assurance of support from the Congress and the Rashtriya Janata Dal], the Prime Minister will be seen as a poor herdsman of his own flock.

Captivity to continue

TUESDAY brought double trouble for Kannada film icon Rajkumar. In Delhi the Supreme Court blocked the release of 51 TADA detenues thereby virtually prolonging his captivity. In Chennai a confidante of Veerappan pulled out of the negotiation team jeopardising efforts at securing his early release. But the real challenge is for the state governments of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. They have been boxed in. They cannot talk the brigand into freeing the aged actor; the apex court verdict makes that illegal and threatens them with certain contempt of court proceedings. They cannot wash their hands off the whole affair as Bangalore and several border towns are sitting on a tinder box of welled-up anti-Tamil sentiments. The sense of helplessness has been compounded by the severe tongue-lashing of the Supreme Court which has charged the two states with unconstitutional abdication of authority and duty. It is all unfair but very official and final. The most serious charge is that the Karnataka government and the police did not calmly assess the law and order situation. Obviously the state has failed to present its case or the court is unconvinced of the defence. The state’s action should be seen in the context of what happened in the late eighties. The same Rajkumar was attacked at a hill resort of Tamil Nadu while shooting a Kannada film. He returned to Bangalore immediately and that was the trigger for anti-Tamil rioting. In 1991 more than a dozen lives were lost in another anti-Tamil mob violence, this time over the sharing of Cauvery waters. The provocation on both occasions was mild compared to the more than 100 days of Raj Kumar remaining a hostage. It is thus clear that any harm to his life and limb will ignite a bloody upheaval.

The moral outrage the court feels stems from two things. Originally it was the brazen demands of the forest brigand and the seemingly meek submission by the two governments. The latest judgement contains several elements of this feeling. The surrender of the elected governments to a criminal, the demoralisation of the police, the possibility of the released men and women retaliating against all those who were witnesses in the TADA cases and, finally, providing fresh opportunities to Veerappan to further terrorise others — these have shaped the court’s attitude. The latest is the entry of two separatist outfits in the case and on behalf of the kidnapper. The court goes as far as to fear the tearing away of Tamil Nadu from the Indian Union. Nobody obviously told the court that the combined strength of the organisations is less than two dozens and the few followers who have gone to the forest to give company to Veerappan are refugees rather than revolutionaries. The court has shot off eight questions to all and sundry. But two crucial questions are unraised. One, what will be the effect of the verdict on the freedom of Rajkumar and whether he should be condemned to continued captivity? Two, among the 51 detenus there are several women who have been in custody for the past eight years. What about their future and how long will they remain a football in the hectic game between a constrained state government and a constraining Supreme Court? Finally, there is that dreadful question. If riots break out and some persons lose their lives, whose hands will be blood-stained?

C. Subramaniam

THE passing away of elder statesman C. Subramaniam removes from our midst one of the last surviving links with the Nehru era. A protege of the venerable C Rajagopalachari, Rajaji to the masses, Subramaniam truly represented the unsullied image of the politician in those halcyon days immediately after Independence. In fact, his contribution to nation building activities goes back to the days of the Constituent Assembly which drafted the Constitution. As a youth, CS, as he came to be known in later years, responded to the call of Mahatma Gandhi and plunged into the freedom movement. All this, no doubt, gave him an opportunity to rub shoulders with the high and mighty of Indian politics. Working closely with them, he naturally imbibed the essential qualities which go towards making a statesman and an efficient administrator. These attributes certainly stood him in good stead as he served under Chief Ministers Rajaji and Kamaraj in the erstwhile Madras Presidency and State. He performed with aplomb, handling the portfolios of Education, Finance and Law. With his graduation in Physics and Law, CS knew the importance of both basic education and science and technology. His contribution to the spread of primary education under the mid-day meal scheme incentive, the brainchild of Kamaraj, was noteworthy. The string of institutions of agricultural science and science and technology in and around his native Coimbatore district in Tamil Nadu still stands testimony to Subramaniam’s scientific temper.

It was only a matter of time before the talented minister caught the eye of Pandit Nehru, who drafted him to his council of ministers. Though he handled several key portfolios such as Steel, Mines and Heavy Engineering, which were central to the country’s industrial development, Subramaniam is perhaps best remembered for his famous stint as the Food and Agriculture Minister in the mid-60’s. Those were the days of food shortage characterised by the humiliating dependence on American wheat under PL 480. The humiliation served to spur the nation to the Green Revolution. Though it may not be appropriate to call him the “Father of the Green Revolution”, Subramaniam was still one of its architects. He certainly gave the right political leadership to an inspiring team of agricultural scientists who worked under the guidance of Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug. CS vibed well with the scientists and technocrats and left the field open for them to do their work. His greatness lay in his willingness to cut the red tape and his total non-interference with the work of the scientists. A principled politician, Subramaniam began gradually staying away from politics after the infamous Emergency of 1975-77 but was unafraid to air his views on the state of affairs of the nation. As Governor of Maharashtra, he performed his duties in his last public office with customary dignity. His administrative acumen was available to the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan as CS served as its President since 1990 and to his last day. When he was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 1998 for his outstanding service to the nation, none could grudge him the honour.

Diplomacy in Contemporary World
Need to guarantee energy security
by G. Parthasarathy

THE continuing focus on Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism and the Sino-Pakistan nuclear and missile nexus have, among other reasons, led to a lack of adequate attention being paid to what needs to be done to guarantee India’s energy security. There is a tendency to forget that nothing has hurt economic progress, prosperity and the well-being of our people more in the last quarter of a century than the destabilising and debilitating effects of the excessive rise in oil prices, effected periodically by OPEC. While the “oil shocks” caused by price escalations by OPEC in 1974 and 1979 shook our economic stability, it was the Gulf War in 1991, coinciding with our own domestic balance of payments crisis, that demonstrated how vulnerable we are to unexpected and unforeseen developments in our neighbourhood.

If the 1979 oil crisis came in the wake of the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the consequent tensions between the USA and the Revolutionary Regime in Iran, the 1991 crisis was the outcome of the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq and the determination of the Western powers and their allies in the Gulf to roll back this invasion. While the USA and its allies have a huge military presence in the Gulf, to deter any future military adventures affecting stability in the region, the potential for instability in this volatile region caused by national and religious-sectarian rivalries and the threats posed by religious extremism and fundamentalism remains. It also needs to be remembered that nearly 3.3 million Indians live and earn their livelihood in the countries of this region.

The Persian Gulf region today has two-thirds of the world’s reserves of oil and one-third of the global reserves of gas. While Saudi Arabia remains the largest producer of crude oil, it is Iran which has the largest reserves of natural gas. Economic liberalisation and foreign exchange reserves of around $35 billion have given us a feeling of comfort and perhaps even complacency on our external balance of payments situation. We can, however, guarantee our longer-term economic interests only if we take a series of measures to safeguard our energy security, in both economic and diplomatic terms. While there was a time in the 1980s when we were able to meet around two-thirds of our needs of petroleum products domestically, thanks to the Bombay High discoveries, the situation has now changed drastically. We now meet barely one-third of our demand for petroleum products indigenously.

While the Indian economy showed a growth rate of 6.8 per cent during the Eighth Plan, it is now set to grow at around or over 7 per cent. While the world’s energy consumption is growing at around 1 per cent annually, our own energy demands could well grow at around 8 per cent. It needs to be borne in mind that crude oil imports in India rose from 27.35 million tonnes in 1994-95 to around 53.5 million tonnes last year. If the present trends continue we will be importing nearly 80 per cent of our needs of crude oil within a decade, with over two-thirds of these imports coming from the Persian Gulf region. Further, with the need for increasing productivity in the agricultural sector, the demand for fertilisers — both nitrogenous and phosphatic — is going to similarly increase. The petroleum and fertiliser sectors are going to remain, more than ever, crucial to the welfare and well-being of our people.

In diplomacy, like in any other sphere of human endeavour, it does not pay to either place all one’s eggs in the same basket, or to restrict one’s options. Thus, a strategy to meet our requirements of petroleum products and fertilisers has necessarily to be both multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. With the East Asian economies returning to a path of sustained economic growth, the demand for energy resources is set to grow most rapidly in the world in the Asia-Pacific region. China is now going to emerge as a major importer of energy resources like natural gas. Within the Asia-Pacific region, China is surplus in coal, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia have surpluses of oil and natural gas, while Australia has immense resources of coal and natural gas. We need to expand our collaboration with these countries to meet the requirements of natural gas of our states located on the shores of the Bay of Bengal. Just as we have reached an agreement with Qatar for the supply of LNG for our west coast, we need to give a new energy dimension to our “Look East” policies.

New Delhi has now mercifully dropped pretences that it has to support all actions by so-called Third World countries and made its unhappiness and concerns clear to the OPEC cartel about the recent rise in oil prices. It has to be borne in mind that India shares a common concern about price stability and reliability of energy supplies with the advanced G-7 countries. Like these countries, we are naturally concerned about the need to prevent the strengthening of the forces of religious extremism in the politically volatile Gulf and Central Asian regions. There is need for much closer consultations with the G-7 countries on these issues. We should devise a clear strategy on how we would cooperate with these countries in ensuring the safety and security of maritime routes extending from the Straits of Malacca to the Straits of Hormuz. Greater attention should be paid to developing defence and maritime security ties with these countries. We need to carefully analyse whether China’s action of increasing its presence in the Bay of Bengal through closer links with Myanmar and its decision to help Pakistan with the construction of the Gwadar Port in Baluchistan are merely defensive, and meant to augment its energy security, or whether they are designed to assert a military presence encircling India. A dialogue with China on these issues could perhaps clear the air for meaningful cooperation with our northern neighbour on issues of energy cooperation and energy security. China and India could evolve common interests and strategies on these issues.

The focus of our diplomatic attention shifted predominantly to the promotion of trade and investment after the end of the Cold War. It must be said to the credit of our diplomatic establishment that both the Ministry of External Affairs and its embassies abroad responded to the new challenges in a highly professional manner. But it is clear that the long-term economic interests of the country can be adequately safeguarded only if there is a more active focus of attention on energy related issues. While the ONGC has developed some expertise in exploration and other activities abroad, its performance in countries like Vietnam has been disappointing. Indian companies in the petroleum, fertilisers and chemical sectors will now have to be actively encouraged to seek investment opportunities across our entire eastern and western neighbourhoods so that we establish a long-term and significant economic presence in the countries of these regions.

Our companies need to seek strategic partnerships with companies ranging from “Petronas” in Malaysia to “Gazprom” in the Russian Federation. More importantly, much greater attention needs to be paid at home to make our new exploration policy of 1999 for oil and gas more realistic and capable of actually attracting foreign investment. Far too often have ministerial delegations from the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas proceeded on jaunts to western capitals and come back with no results to show for their efforts. Further, the coal sector has been one that has remained almost totally insulated from the winds of change that have produced significant results in economic restructuring in other sectors of our economy. One hopes that these are the issues that will be addressed urgently.

The National Security Council would be well advised to oversee the emergence of a comprehensive strategy that enhances the growth of domestic energy resources and also integrates this with our strategic interaction with the outside world. Failure to do so could well lead to situations where we may, despite our possessing nuclear weapons, be faced with serious energy-related problems affecting the welfare and well-being of our people.

The writer is a former High Commissioner of India to Pakistan.

A seasoned hand from Punjab

THE appointment of Mr Surjit Singh Barnala as the first Governor of Uttaranchal appears to be a happy denouement for all concerned in Akali politics. There is an unmistakable air of give and take among the parties concerned — the Punjab Government and the Centre. Even the Akalis appear to have reconciled themselves to the inclusion of Udham Singh Nagar in the newly created state.

All resentment on this account is now a thing of the past. The Atal Behari Vajpayee government is happy that it has been able to sooth the ruffled feelings of the important NDA ally by giving it the gubernatorial slot. Mr Barnala, who has remained ‘‘unemployed’’ for quite some time since the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, is evidently happy to get back to work, albeit in a largely titular post.

For Mr Barnala, it will be a second such innings after having been the Governor of Tamil Nadu several years ago. He has truly travelled from the plains to the hills. The happy thought for the soft-spoken and mild-mannered Akali leader from Punjab is that no one can now say that he is ‘‘over the hill’’ in public life.

The energetic sanyasin

Fire-spitting Uma Bharati has done it again! She is back in the government, just a couple of months after she left it. Whether in government or out of it, the energetic ‘‘sanyasin’’ just cannot be kept quiet. When she quit the government, her declared intention was to devote more time to ‘‘agitational politics’’. True to her word, she raised the banner of backward classes. She had demanded that women from the OBCs should be given their due in the Women’s Reservation Bill. She had even threatened to raise the issue in Parliament. Last month she made headlines by staging a dharna before the offices of a weekly news magazine, protesting against its publication of an interview with her which she claimed never took place.

Obviously, this sanyasin is not governed by ‘‘sadhvik guna’’. Now that she has got back the ministerial chair, will her agitational politics take a back seat?

Underworld dons of Mumbai

The exploits of Mumbai’s underworld dons read stranger than fiction. The crimes they have committed with impunity are more chilling than the most horrid fiction in the crime genre. The way they have been able to dodge the long arm of law is baffling to the man in the street who is usually naive about the working of the international crime network. He is familiar with the name of Chhota Rajan, as the gangster is in the news these days with the Indian government desperately trying to extradite him from Thailand, but simply cannot figure out why he cannot be brought to India to face trial in a host of murder cases.

Like his one-time boss, the dreaded Dawood Ibrahim, who masterminded the Mumbai serial blasts in 1993, Chhota Rajan has employed every trick in the crime book to evade arrest. Added to this, help also comes from the absence of an extradition treaty with countries where the dons flee.

Global narcotics mafia play the key role in the protection of these fugitives. The Thai authorities have refused to play ball with the Maharashtra Government which had sent a police team to work out the don’s extradition. Bangkok has indicated that it would interact with only the Central Government. Now, the ball is in the Centre’s court. Named in at least a score of murder cases, Chhota Rajan’s real name is Rajendra Sadashiv Nikhalje. The prefix ‘‘Chhota’’ stuck with him after the killing of his mentor Rajan Nair.

The links between these dons and Mumbai’s film world, the so-called Bollywood, are well known. The CBI report on the match-fixing scandal hints at possible links between the dons and at least one of the indicted willow-wielders — Mohammed Azharuddin. Poor Azhar, where has greed taken the once simple, homespun Hyderabadi lad?

Providing vital service

Over the years, ISRO has given India a credible presence in space, especially with the Insat series. Insat, established in 1982 when Insat 1-B satellite was commissioned, is a joint venture of the Department of Space, Meteorological Department, Department of Telecommuni-cations, AIR, etc.

The Insat system provides uninterrupted services to the country in vital areas like telecommunications, meteorology and disaster warning.

The decommissioning of Insat 2-B should be taken in a matter of course manner. The satellite completed its designed life in July this year, but it was still being utilised. It was, however, living on borrowed time. When it lost its earth-lock around 2.30 pm on November 3, it was obvious that the end was inevitable, though ISRO scientists made valiant efforts from the Master Control Facility at Hassan to revive it. When a satellite loses its earth-lock, it is no longer able to maintain its direction. Therefore, panels that keep the batteries charged do not face the right direction.

Manoeuvering the satellite back to its original path can rectify this. It couldn’t be done in this case because of the depletion of the oxidiser, which is essential to the fuel used for manoeuvering. Therefore, there was no possibility of orbit and attitude control. Insat-2B had C-band, extended C-band, S-band transponders and meteorology payload. Most of the telecommunication and broadcast services had been transferred to other satellites by the time Insat 1-B was decommissioned. These included the satellite communication services of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd and private operators, including Essel Shyam and RPG. The satellite may be “dead”, but the services initiated and sustained by it live on.

SCIENTISTS are preparing to infect heart disease patients with genetically engineered viruses. The modified microbes would kickstart the patients’ hearts into manufacturing life-saving proteins and so restore their health, say the researchers.

The project is part of an ambitious programme aimed at countering coronary disease, now sweeping Britain. In the past 10 years, hospital admissions of patients with serious heart impairment have risen by 50 per cent. It is now the leading cause of death in the country.

Several onslaughts have been launched in a concerted bid to tackle the disease, including a major programme based in Glasgow, a city afflicted with the nation’s worst cardiac statistics.

“Most coronary research has concentrated on prevention, on changing people’s lifestyles so they reduce their risk of getting heart disease,” said Prof Godfrey Smith of Glasgow University’s Institute of Biomedical and Life Science. “By contrast, we are trying to put things right after heart disease sets in and to do that we plan to exploit genetically modified viruses.”

Scientists have found that as heart disease begins to affect a person, arteries thicken, cholesterol levels rise, and — crucially — their heart cells become damaged. As a result, cells stop making a series of key proteins needed for their survival.

“It is downhill after that,” Smith said. “The patient becomes a heart attack timebomb. Their cells perform less and less well, until full cardiac arrest ensues.”

In a bid to understand this cascade of cardiac disintegration, Smith and his team have studied biopsies from coronary bypass patients. In each case a few hundred cells were taken from the heart’s complement of 10 million. Using these, the team pinpointed a key protein, Serca-2, that determines the health of a coronary cell. In low levels, a person risks a heart attack. In elevated amounts, their prospects look good.

“It is one thing identifying a missing protein, it is a very different matter when you try to put it back in a cell,” Smith said. “However, we believe we have found a way, using genetically modified viruses.”

Viruses infect our bodies by inserting DNA into our cells, which then begin to manufacture fragments of virus. By adding a gene for a particular protein to the virus, an infected cell will then be persuaded to manufacture that protein as well.

Experiments by Smith and his team, using viruses, genetically engineered to make the heart protein, are getting heart cells, grown in the laboratory, to resume manufacture of normal levels of Serca-2. The final phase will be to launch clinical trials on humans.

“It is a controversial idea,” Smith said. “A related project in America was recently suspended when a patient died. However, we will be proceeding very cautiously. In addition, any virus used on a human patient will have been disabled so it cannot reproduce inside their bodies.”

The Glasgow project has also developed a test to detect when heart cells have become seriously damaged and which can therefore predict when a person is at imminent risk of having a major coronary. “We found that cells in a diseased heart release large amounts of a protein — called BNP, brain natriuretic peptide,” said Prof Henry Dargie, leader of this part of the project. “We use that as the test.”

The end result, say the Glasgow researchers, will be a test that will pinpoint potential heart attack victims, and the development of techniques that may counter their condition.

— By arrangement with The Guardian

Coping with crisis of time
By Darshan Singh Maini

I trust, no great theologian or thinker, philosopher or ideologist, writer or artist has, in his feeling for the sublime, resisted the temptation to understand and, in his own way, master the crisis of time.

In an earlier piece in the series, I touched upon the concept, nature and working of the sublime in man's life from the earth beneath his feet to the blue skies above. That's to say how the sublime became manifest as much in the daily business and traffic of life as in the higher planes of music, art, dance poetry etc. It is thus that the sublime became "a voyage through values". It appears to me that when we ponder the problem in relation to time, the sublime tends to acquire dimensions which vary from the sacred to the profane, from the metaphysical to the religious. If, therefore, we try to understand the question of time — an eternal quest of man is search of essences, of permanence — the intersection of the sublime, its penetration in the phenomena of nature, and in "the phenomenon of man", to recall Pierce de Chardin's book sporting that title, begin to show in leaf and branch, in feather and flight, in the poetry of the seasons, and in the rhythms of the hand and the wheel.

It's the mystery or mystique of time which triggers the troubled imagination into all manner of variations on the theme. In that sense, the closest analogy is with music in its sublime forms when the artist immersed in the deeps of being explores in varying degrees, aspects and altitudes, plays upon the instrument of his inclination, or works up with his tongue a complex symphony of sounds which seems to annihilate time for some moments of ecstasy. In those strivings, groupings and reaching-outs, he swings from pole to pole, from heights to depths, from spaces to spaces and planes to planes. The Indian classical ragas, for instance, are a unique example of the variations that the human hand or tongue can achieve when the desire to transcend the constraints of time becomes an aching requirement of the psyche.

However, the aesthetic forms of transcendence — music, poetry, painting, dance — are real insofar as they annihilate the divisions in unions, in paradox, in irony etc. They too come at last to a point where the human reality bound in time, and by time, cannot bear the full weight of ambiguities, and language per se seeking comfort in metaphors and other figures of speech itself becomes a barrier to the breakthrough. And that's why those inclined to the mystic state of mind seek silence, or sunnya, which in its positive aspects is the arrival of the spirit at what T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets calls "the still point of the turning world". Now the touch of the sublime in that moment of time, and in that state of stillness is something which may only be felt on the pulse, not described in any form of language.

In sum, it's within the bounds of time — past or future — can man cope with, imperfectly though, the problematics of time.

For one thing, for all our conscious or willed efforts we can never erase our memories on our own; they become an involuntary part of our mental baggage, and lie fermenting in the cellars of the unconscious. Nostalgia and deep poetic images rise in later moments of extreme suffering from that source, and become real and instant in presence even when their reality is spent.

Though in Oriental, Indian thought, such ideas have found frequent and eloquent expression in song and story, in tomes and treatises, the Western mind after the Renaissance and the Enlightenment or "the Age of Reason" turned, during the last five centuries or so, to measuring time in terms of clocks and calendars, and reducing it to "commodity" in a sense. And thus the scientific and materialistic world-view became the world thought tender. To be sure, even in those ages, some thinkers and writers and artists did not fall into the trap of time except as a physical phenomenon, as a putative problem. And the great among them sought to appropriate time for their inner estate much in the manner of the ancient bards and divines. In fact, many such souls remained striving after a convergence or even symbiosis of the sacred and the profane. One could cite the names of several such writers and thinkers from the Greek times to our own day only to prove that the quarrel with time is an unending quest, and it's in that quest that man can hope to achieve some kind of earthly 'nirvana' or feel the impact of the sublime.

That's why the Einsteinian science, the Quantum Theory, Heisenberg's "Law of Indeterminacy" in the end found the Newtonian science and the Darwinian dialectic insufficient. The third dimension — of time — was brought into the picture to understand the indeterminable nature of the human reality, to account for the moments of the sublime that do not permit man to become a slave to the mechanistic view of the world.

In our own scriptures and works of philosophy, one finds scores of metaphors regarding the fluidity of time, and the realisation of the sublime in such states of consciousness. Hence the streams flowing into the seas and water merging into water, the lower reality subsumed in the higher.

Now, only to live in the present is to live, like a hedonist, in a pleasurable illusion; to live only in the past is to live on faded dreams; and to live in the future is to become an isolato, an alien to one's reality. So to remain authentically alive is to live simultaneously in the three-dimensional time. Similarly, to live chiefly within the confines of one's own consciousness is to slip into the fallacy of solipsism, and lose one's hold on the objective reality. And to live only on the visible reality is to lose the soul of things. Without subjectivity, there's no intensity, no poetry; without objectivity no vision or perspective. The life sublime sends signals to only the responding minds.

The sublime isn't outside the pale of time, and in whichever form we may find it expressed, it belongs, in the end, to one's consciousness linked to the higher levels of reality.

SPIRITUAL  NUGGETS

Seeing without thought, without the word, without the response of memory is wholly different from seeing with thought and feeling. What you see with thought is superficial, then seeing is only partial; there is no seeing at all. Seeing a cloud over a mountain without thought and its responses, is the miracle of the "new". It is not "beautiful", it is explosive in its immensity. It is creation.

*****

The diamond cannot be separated from its qualities. The feeling of envy cannot be separated from the experience of that feeling, though an illusory division does exist which breeds conflict, and in this conflict the mind is caught. When this false separation disappears, there is a possibility of freedom,and only then is the mind still. It is only when the experience ceases that there is the creative movement of the real.

*****

The fact, that "what is", and "what should be" are two entirely different things. The "what should be" involves time and distance, sorrow and fear. Death of these only leaves the fact, the "what is". Thought which breeds time cannot operate on the fact; thought cannot change the fact, it can only escape from it and when all urge to escape is dead, then the fact undergoes tremendous mutation.

*****

Becoming and being are two widely different states and you cannot go from one to the other; but with the ending of becoming, the other is.

*****

Greed, even for the sublime, breeds sorrow; the urge for more opens the door to time.

*****

The urge for repetition of an experience, however pleasant, beautiful fruitful, is the soil in which sorrow grows.

—From J. Krishanamurti's Notebook and Commentaries on Living, Vol. II.