The leaves of New Haven have begun to bleed. In a few weeks they will die, marking with their death the onset of the long dark winter that envelops the north of the earth. But here in America, nature will celebrate one last, glorious burst of energy, color, radiance and joy. Decline and fall are the natural end of the cycles of life, but never was a fall more resplendent than in the autumn of America.
These leaves will dance their way to death with such grace, such beauty, such abandon. If only human beings could possess the courage of nature. Every life then would burst with joy before being consumed by time. Instead most of us dither, shamble, shuffle and sniffle our way to death, remote from our past, taunted by the present and terrified by the future.
Nature is a philosopher, and defeats time with its impunity. Autumn is the season of the last fling before the inevitable victory of that bleak horizon which has been with us from birth.
These leaves float toward a story. Omar Khayyam understood death, not because he was a poet but because he was a scientist, an astronomer who spent his nights with the mysteries of existence beyond the reach of a mere earth. Khayyam lived dangerously, because he refused the option of silence in a volatile age of despair, rebellion, confusion and uprising in the Muslim world from Samarkand to Baghdad, and Damascus to Cairo.
His two famous contemporaries were Nizam-ul Mulk, who wrote the classic treatise on Islamic polity and served as the vazir and anchor of the rising power of the Seljuq Turks; and Hassan Sabah. Defying all predictions, Khayyam died peacefully in old age.
We are at Yale Law School for a seminar on the Silk Route in the 21st Century, organized by the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and driven by Strobe Talbott and my old friend Nayan Chanda. Through two days academic minds weave through the game of snakes-and-ladders being played between Turkey and Kazakhstan, through the Caucasus and Central Asia. It used to be a Silk Route. It is now the Gas and Oil Route, and infinitely richer. All the powers and superpowers have placed a grubby paw and oily hand on the region.
Academics offer propositions, summations, interventions and prejudice with a disarming display of objectivity. One of them, who shall be nameless, offers the startling thesis that since the budget of three regions is less than that of Yale University, they have no right to define themselves as nations. The budget of India, I recall reading somewhere, is less than the budget of New York: Should that disqualify us too? The panels change with the topics. They sit on a podium of carved wood, more like a bench of the Supreme Court than a bench of the university, paid to judge rather than paid to think. But the image is deceptive.
Academics are mild and pleasant when taken away from a microphone. A meal induces the best out of them. The finest of them are not averse to a nap, even on a podium. But get them into a debate over Armenia and Turkey or Georgia and Russia and the steel begins to clatter. We should all applaud the fact that academics are human.
Nature may go to sleep every winter. America goes to sleep every weekend. New Haven, where Yale is situated, goes into a coma. The Lord, when creating this world, gave man one day every week to rest. American Television, when creating news, ordered two days of rest.
Round the clock, Monday to Friday, you can get all the news, particularly about the baby beaten by her mother in Indiana, or the dog rescued from a cliff in Plainsville. But come the weekend and the world must wait till Monday again to blow itself up. Memo to all nations: There is no point in starting a war over a weekend. If it hasn’t reached American TV it isn’t news.
My only option was the indefatigable CNN, and CNN was showing some strange documentary.
Saddam Hussein needs Mata Hari to work for him in the United States. He has the New York Times. There is no need anymore to send out James Bond. All you have to do is to be pals with the editor.
The lead story in Saturday’s Times would, not too long ago, have invited a charge of high treason against both the journal and its informants. It describes the contents of “a highly detailed set of military options for attacking Iraq” quoting officials of both the Pentagon and the White House. Which spy could ever boast of moles who had burrowed so deep. All Saddam has to do if he wants to know American plans for him is to read the newspapers.
The timing of America’s war against Iraq is going to be between January and February, when the weather is cooler and the nights are longer. The heavy uniforms of the US Army (particularly of those who will go in search of chemical weapons) is not designed for heat. And the longer nights give America an edge in warfare since it is armed with night-vision binoculars, unlike the Iraqi Army. The war will open from the air with swarms of B52s knocking out the command centers with 2000-pound laser-guided bombs. Once Iraq’s response-capability is neutralized, some 100,000 troops, with another 150,000 in reserve, would invade from Kuwait (Turkey is a reluctant partner this time around).
Once upon a time Sherlock Holmes would have been given a fortune, or at least a gong, to keep such war plans out of the hands of the Evil Powers. Modern journalism has made the mystery genre irrelevant.
Have finally discovered the essence of President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy. It was on television.
Being a news junkie, I kept surfing after daybreak yesterday for some channel to offer something other than movies, cartoons and crazy faces. The moving finger surfed, and having surfed, rested on Arnold Schwarzenegger. The hunk-chunk was dressed in Hamlet-black. He glowered at a skull, and delivered the first line of an immortal soliloquy. “To be or not to be...” he began. Suddenly a switch in voice-pace. “I’ll take it!” he said, swiveled, threw the skull away, slashed with his sword, and strode on.
I imagine George Bush on his ranch, studying Dick Cheney’s skull as the two discuss Iraq. “To be or not to be...I’ll take it!” The decision is made. The world is safe from evil.
Take this as you will... One consequence of 9/11 that may not become widely advertised is that local American Muslims (not the ones imported from India and Pakistan, that is) have begun to quietly reassert their faith rather than distance themselves from it. An interesting story about African-Americans in a New York prison provides more evidence.
David Miller, superintendent of the Eastern New York Correctional Facility (this is the age of politically correct nomenclature: In the bad old days prisons were called Sing Sing or Jail house Rock or whatever) says that attendance at namaaz by prisoners has gone up 50 percent in the last year and some 150 convicts are attending classes in Arabic, the Muslim traditions and the Holy Qur’an. The imam of the prison mosque, Yasin Latif, added: “It has been a significant awakening call. The Muslims on the fence at the time of the tragedy (9/11) felt they had to make a statement for the true Islam.”
