A Kung Fu Panda Pact

HUMBLE CONFESSION, with duly abject apologies. My knowledge of Chinese martial arts is most deplorably restricted to the cute skills of Kung Fu Panda on children’s television. And the occasional glimpse of Uncle Google’s Omnipotent Dictionary in pursuit of a crossword clue. This frivolity must stop. Serious geostrategic developments in our subcontinental region demand a radical rethink.

President Mohamed Muizzu of Maldives has just signed—or inked, as the professionals put it—a military pact with China to draw an impregnable security line around his multi-island nation, after demanding the removal of less than a hundred Indian personnel manning a couple of helicopters largely for humanitarian deployment. President Muizzu disclosed details of this historic alliance with China on March 6, after meeting the august VIPs Major General Zhang Baoqun, deputy director of the office for international military cooperation, and president of the Export-Import Bank of China Ren Shengjun. The Chinese will provide, to quote Muizzu, “non-lethal arms and training” to strengthen Maldives’ “independence and autonomy” and we had better believe him.

This is no time for complacency. And time for acknowledgment of deficiency. If Maldives had signed such a non-lethal arms deal with India, all we would have been able to provide would be expertise in lathi combat, and I am not totally sure that even this would have been permissible under international treaty law. A lathi blow can be pretty lethal if aimed at the cranium. Of course, we could also have tried Kerala’s Kalaripayattu, but that includes the use of a short sword and broad shield, so that’s that then. The Chinese are going to give the Maldives armed forces world-class expertise in Knoshu, Wushu, Gung fu in addition to hundreds of other art forms developed across millennia. Some experts point out that while the Japanese Karate is offensive, Kung fu is defensive, but that is not the way Kung Fu Panda does it.

So there we are. When a hostile enemy attacks with evil drones, wicked missiles, and monstrous ships, the Maldives armed forces will be ready with Kung fu.

A tribute to Chinese diplomatic sophistication. They understand their friends even better than they understand their enemies.

IF, AS ST JOHN asserted in the first verse of his Gospel, in the beginning was the word and the word was God, then the rest of philology is human, catering to the complications of continuous experience. Language is a byproduct of unprecedented events or new knowledge to make them part of communication.

A word at the centre of the idea of democracy, ‘populist’, emerged in the turbulent America of the 1880s when an alliance of farmers was formed to challenge the domination of corporations in an age when industrialisation sought to define progress. The farmers wanted better prices for their products through collective bargaining and lower interest rates, but prices and usury were controlled by the gleaming new temples of mammon, corporate boardrooms. James Weaver, their candidate in the American presidential elections of 1892, did better in retrospect than seemed at the time, but a sectional cause rarely reaches its objective until it finds the mantra of alliances. Weaver did well in four states, Idaho, Kansas, Colorado, and Nevada, but was lost after defeat. His vote shifted to the Democrats in 1896, and American democracy found other avenues for momentum.

Has any popular movement in democratic India given us a new word? On quick recall I can only think of ‘Naxaliya’ or ‘Naxalite’, preserving the memory of a violent Maoist-Marxist upsurge that sent a shudder down our collective spine in the 1960s and 1970s. The various farmers’ movements in our country have not yet created a new term or phrase, perhaps because they have not found an innovative indigenous strategy. Their demands are as old as the conflicts of the marketplace in the battlefields of economic evolution. This does not make them irrelevant. But they do need to introspect about one fact: Where are the allies even across the sweep of agricultural India?

ST JOHN WAS the poet among the disciples of Jesus. The first verse of his Gospel is deservedly famous. But I am haunted by the magic of his second and third verses describing creation: “…the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters… Then God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light.” That light was from the eternal fire of knowledge, and knowledge is lost without vocabulary.

IT IS A FUNDAMENTAL duty of a diary to descend from the sublime to the familiar, but do so on the downward ladder of association. Should ‘Bazball’, a term concocted by the authors of the latest chapter of English cricket, enter the dictionary of knowledge or is it no more than a fad dreamt up by a half-clever ad agency? Evidence from the present India- England series suggests that the hype was a flurry, and you cannot inflict the culture of a limited game upon the strategies necessary for the unique five-day format. Cricket is the only sport in history with the courage to spread its genius across five days of thought, labour and creativity. Its variations are welcome. But the oil of change cannot mix with the water of the original.

The variations came when Anglo-Australian cricketers began to weaken from old age in the 1970s. The West Indies, armed with the aggression of usurpers, were the first to challenge the establishment on the field by stretching the violence inherent in the format to the tensile elasticity of the rules. The change had to be institutionalised to survive; hence One-Day cricket and then its moveable spawn. The old sits beside the new, with different degrees of comfort, with space for all in the multi-generation family. What will not survive is hybrid cross-fertilisation.

George Bernard Shaw, English literature’s indefatigable gadfox rather than gadfly, thought the English had invented cricket to give them some sense of eternity since they had no idea of spirituality. Worth a thought, even if Shaw was an Irishman who understood the genetic commitment of the English to the many forms of colonialism.

Indians love cricket for their own reason. It brings out the hidden child inside. Football is another story. It brings out the disguised teenager.

A LETTER IN THE English weekly Spectator provides some fine details about the authentic, as opposed to merely political, history of Indo-Anglia. In 1924, Edward Palmer, a retired officer of the Indian Army, set up a Mughal pavilion at the Wembley Empire Exhibition. The reason was personal. Palmer’s great-great-grandfather, a general in the East India Company Army of Indian sepoys and British officers, had married Begum Fyze Baksh, a Mughal princess. Palmer’s curry was a hit. Encouraged, he opened Veeraswamy on Swallow Street in the heart of London; this restaurant became popular and remains iconic. Among its patrons was a cousin of King George V, Prince Axel of Denmark. The prince so enjoyed his dinner that he sent a case of Danish beer, Carlsberg Pilsner, as a gift. That began the fashion for a beer with Indian curry, and launched the rise of Carlsberg as a multinational.

Such is the narrative of commerce.

About The Author

MJ Akbar

MJ Akbar is the author of, among several titles, Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan. His latest book is Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns

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