Pillaiyar’s Portrait Painter

 The words below were delivered yesterday over Mahen’s remains. There was no PA and quite a bit of unavoidable noise. People told me later they hadn’t been able to hear me properly, and many asked for a printed copy of what I had said. This blog post is for them.The temptation to add here to what I said there has been strong – there’s so much more that I could say – but I’ve avoided it.

Though it feels like I’ve known Mahen all my life, we weren’t boyhood friends. I was in my early twenties when we met; he, of course, was younger. He always will be, now.

       I remember our first meeting well. It was in 1982, at the Post Horn Gallop cast party – or, to be more accurate, on the street outside, which happened to be Initium Road, Dehiwela. Mahen hadn’t been invited to the party, but he had an interest in a young lady who had. Being Mahen, he was too shy to steam in anywhere without an invitation, so he waited outside in the hope of catching a glimpse of the adored object. He was, I think I should say, about eighteen at the time.

       I was playing guitar at the party. My friend Shiraz Rustomjee was overly impressed by my plunking, so he grabbed me and insisted that I play something for his music-loving buddy who was waiting outside. I followed him out through the front gate with my guitar – and there was Mahen, all alone, perched on the bonnet of somebody else’s car and smoking a cigarette. 

       I strummed a few chords and asked him inside, though it wasn’t my party. He declined, and would not be persuaded. I had the impression of someone who was a loner, a bit of a maverick – someone who didn’t consider himself respectable enough for polite society. In all the years I knew him, that impression never really left me. I don’t think it ever left him, either, for all that he ended up with a staggering number of friends and professional collaborators and a considerable artistic reputation. There was always something about Mahen that wouldn’t fit the conventional template, however hard he tried to make himself conform.

       Mahen, you see, had a difficult youth. His father Maurice, a military officer and a stern disciplinarian, died while he was still a young child, and his mother Carmen had to work very hard, for many years, to care and provide for him and his sister and brothers. His teenage years were wayward – he was badly injured in a motorcycle accident, briefly fell victim, as many Colombo kids from good families did around that time, to drugs, and when he cleaned up for good it was by letting himself be imprisoned in a gaol-like rehab camp run military-style by a ferocious Buddhist monk – an experience that scarred him, I think, more deeply than the drugs did. All this was before I met him; they were things he told me about later.

       We didn’t become close friends immediately. It wasn’t till 1984, when he was working with his sister Sharmini, Dominic Sansoni and Tilak Conrad at Babylon, that I began to see more of him – and discovered what an outstanding artist and designer he was. His talent with the airbrush, in particular, was matchless; he remains to this day the finest artist on that instrument that Lanka has ever produced. 

       Our first professional collaboration was in 1988, on a couple of jobs for Access Graphics, where he was working at the time; it was the start of a creative partnership that lasted, intermittently, for the rest of his life. When I went off to Singapore in 1991 I gave him my motorbike; that finally ended its days impounded at Buttala police station, but it wasn’t Mahen’s fault. It’s a long story, though, and not quite suitable for a family audience. 

       The next time I saw Mahen was just after dawn one morning in Changi, Singapore, where I was living. He wasn’t expected, so it was a bit of a shock to see him at the front door. He told me he’d had to leave Lanka in a hurry after painting a cover for an Asiaweek feature that our president at the time didn’t like. Cast out again, you see. The magazine, very decently, offered him a job at their head office in Hong Kong. He had to change planes in Singapore to get there, though, and had a few hours between flights – hence the unannounced early-morning visit.

       Hong Kong, I think, is where Mahen properly grew up. It’s where he met his first wife, Nadia, and really began making a professional name for himself. Unfortunately I can’t tell you much about those years; I finished with Singapore fairly soon and returned to Lanka; he stayed in Hong Kong for a good long while, living on an outlying island and catching the ferry to work on the mainland every weekday morning. He later moved to Singapore to work with a music, art and fashion magazine called M3, of which he was chief art director. You can buy used copies of M3, with Mahen’s covers on them, on eBay for fifty dollars or more these days. Fifty US, that is. 

       Later he started his own design agency in Singapore, MCN. I used to visit the so-called Lion City on and off in those days, so we reconnected often. Now and then MCN would ask me to do some work for them, but even when I was just passing through I often stayed with him and Nadia at their lovely bungalow out on Seletar Air Base. Singapore showed Mahen to me in a very different frame: devoted father – Leah was just a baby then – family man, successful entrepreneur-manager: a man with dependants, and sizeable responsibilities that he discharged conscientiously without ever losing an iota of his love of a good time. He was also painting away, using an old freight container in the garden as his studio. He had already found the subject – Ganesh, the god of beginnings and endings – that he would devote himself to, artistically speaking, for the rest of his life.

       I was impressed, even a little envious. But in the midst of all these changes, there was so much about my friend that remained the same. And this, I must tell you, was marvellous. Despite his worldly success, Mahen remained as humble and self-effacing as he had been the day I met him on Initium Road. He was, of course, fully aware of the excellence of his talent and the superiority of his craft, but neither these, nor the success he was enjoying with them, had turned his head in the least. He had not lost his sense of humour, nor his love for his friends, which was so much at odds with his shyness. He hated big parties and showy events, preferring to have people about him in small, familiar circles. His professional image, too, was low-key: MCN was small but it had big, big clients, and it ran like clockwork. When he offered me a full-time job there in late 2003 I jumped at it, abandoning a project in Colombo that was just coming to fruition – and incurring the wrath of one or two of you who are present here today – to do so. 

       My time at MCN was wonderful but brief; I returned to Colombo just after the Presidential election of 2005 – not quite willingly, but it was a good thing I did, because I was here when, not long afterwards, Mahen found himself cast out – yes, again – from his adopted homeland and was obliged to return to Lanka, looking for things to do and people to reconnect with. He joined Q&E Advertising, where I was creative director at the time; but the urge to be his own man – another thing that never changed about him – was too strong. He set up a new iteration of MCN, working out of his house in Nawala, and I did a great deal of work with him, though only as a freelance. By then I had known for years how good he was, but the reminder was exhilarating; he remains by far the best art director I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with a few legends. People who observed us at our craft would be amazed at how fast we came up with stuff, how we kept finishing each other’s doodles and sentences, how much we laughed at ourselves while doing it. It was a high, and no mistake – one I shall never enjoy again.

       We were closest, perhaps, in the last years of his life, after he met and married Rachel, and Manu came along. We’d both seen a lot of ups and downs by then, and understood each other, perhaps, better than ever. He remained, to the very last, the same kindly, easygoing, hospitable man he had always been – slow to anger, slow to judge and mild in his judgements, ever quick with ideas and impressions, innately musical yet too shy to sing a note – though he had, in fact, a beautiful singing voice. For all his sense of himself as a maverick and a rebel, his ethics and style were of the oldest and most courtly variety, reflecting his lifelong horror of anything excessive, ostentatious or vulgar. 

       Courtesy, privacy and a sense of what is fitting also showed in the way he handled his illness. When he received his diagnosis he came over, on his own, to tell Ruveka and me about it. He said he didn’t care to rot away in some hospital but would die with dignity – what little dignity death leaves us at the end – in his own bed. Apart from an absolutely essential course of radiotherapy at one point, he refused all but palliative and analgesic care. He continued to be as sociable and welcoming as ever, seeing his friends in little groups as was his habit. He and I spent some happy hours together in the months after his diagnosis. They were short months, though; the doctors had given him a year to eighteen months, but in the end, he got just six.

       I was less brave than he. Sharmini called last Thursday and told me he was fading; but cowardice disguised as a misplaced sense of responsibility made me complete some chores before I drove over, and I reached his front door at just about the moment he took his final leave. 

       Since then, I’ve been trying very hard not to think, though this last duty that he has laid upon me has forced me to confront the thoughts I had been hiding from. These words are the result.

MAHEN CHANMUGAM

23 vii 1964–30 x 2025

‘My life has been unusually full of beginnings and endings: 

good ones that ended badly, bad ones that ended well.’

From Hippo, with Love

Confessions 

St Augustine

This is, apparently, the world’s first autobiography. The parts of the narrative that deal with the author’s personal and emotional life are both well told and historically interesting, not to say fascinating. Augustine was also one of the greatest ancient post-Classical philosophers, and I was impressed by his ability to communicate difficult ideas lucidly.

    I’m not religious, so that aspect of the book was less important to me than it would be to most readers. I am interested in theodicy, but I found Augustine’s rather unsatisfactory – the usual Catholic position of blaming everything on human free will and error without tangling with the real questions about the power and goodness of God that are raised by the existence of evil. Augustine says evil isn’t a substance in its own right but simply the absence of good, or more accurately the absence of some good; in other words, evil as such doesn’t really exist. All things are good to God, he explains, but some things are less than perfectly good. All this is very neatly laid out but the logical contradictions are not addressed or even, it seemed to me, noticed.

    What I’d been hoping for most from this book was some insight regarding how an intelligent person (as Augustine most certainly was, though his true genius lay elsewhere) could appease or silence their intellect in order to accept the logical and moral contradictions of Christian belief. I have seen it happen to people in real life, and it always looks to me like self-betrayal, essentially giving up on oneself and settling for the easy option – like that bit in Watership Down where some of the escaped rabbits grow weary of the hardships of life in the wild and decide to return to the farm (and certain slaughter at the hands of the farmer).

    What I’d been hoping for most from this book was some insight regarding how an intelligent person (as Augustine most certainly was, though his true genius lay elsewhere) could appease or silence their intellect in order to accept the logical and moral contradictions of Christian belief. I have seen it happen to people in real life, and it always looks to me like self-betrayal, essentially giving up on oneself and settling for the easy option – like that bit in Watership Down where some of the escaped rabbits grow weary of the hardships of life in the wild and decide to return to the farm (and certain slaughter at the hands of the farmer). But in this regard, I was thoroughly disappointed by the Confessions; all the author has to say on the subject is that the Word of God supersedes all other knowledge and renders all intellectual questions irrelevant. I’ve heard that line before and I’m afraid it does not convince me.

    As for the man himself, he always did believe in God, in one form or another, so this question never troubled him. His quest was not for God but for a religion that could meet his intellectual and psychological needs. As the narrative approached the moment of his conversion I grew quite excited, waiting for the big intellectual denouement, but the whole thing came and went in a welter of emotive description and heartfelt praise, like the climactic scene of a romance novel, without a single intelligent word said about what I really wanted to understand.

    At this point I rather lost interest in the good father’s story. The investigation of time in Book XI is impressive, certainly for someone writing in an era lacking accurate timepieces; Augustine could probably have been persuaded agree with Einstein that ‘the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.’ I skipped most of Book XII, in which the author seems to take to task those who interpret the Bible symbolically before doing, as far as I could see, exactly the same. I skipped the last book, XIII, completely.
    I wish I knew of a critical analysis or review of the Confessions for non-religious readers, written from a secular, essentially philosophical and historical perspective. If anyone knows of such a thing, please tell me about it. I want to read it – so long as it’s not too long-winded.

Digital Dualism

When people project their thoughts along what even we greybeards no longer call the Information Superhighway, nuance and subtlety seem to get left behind in the parking lot. Our opinions and responses, even with regard to the most complex ideas and issues, are reduced to brutally opposed binaries: for vs against, men vs women, Left vs Right, us vs them, good vs evil. We act as though each of us is all one thing or another, as if where we stand on any issue completely defines who we are.

    Conceptual binaries are, of course, an essential part of our human mental equipment, but they’re far from being the whole toolkit. Nothing, to coin a phrase, is all black or white. The world is a messy, complicated place, infinitely varied in all its aspects, and human beings are evidently the messiest and most complicated things that exist in it. Binaries, therefore, useful though they are for the operations of logic, cannot even begin to describe us. Binaries are just endpoints on the spectrum of all possible measurements some physical, economic, social or psychological variable. Sometimes we can look at these variables as being made up of relevant binaries added together in different proportions, the way you get varying shades of grey by mixing black and white in differing proportions. But however it is these intermediate positions are defined or arrived at, most of us – when offline, at least – are willing to acknowledge their existence. We don’t normally think of the world and its inhabitants as being all one way or the other, with nothing in between: not unless we’re idiots, or fanatics.

    But when we get on the internet, and particularly (though by no means exclusively) on social media, all that subtlety and nuance, all those insights into how complicated life is, how conflicted people are, how difficult and often illogical our behaviour and in particular our moral choices can be, and how much allowance for all this one should make when dealing with others – all these suddenly seem to vanish. If anyone disagrees with us, they’re The Enemy, to be opposed, argued with, trolled, gulled, ridiculed, insulted and beaten back into the digital undergrowth with every resource at our disposal. We scarcely notice that in projecting this kind of extremism on to our opponents, we make extremists of ourselves too; by pushing them into one corner we inevitably force ourselves into the opposite one, and never even notice that we’re doing it.
    As someone who does most of his communicating these days through the internet, I have had reason to think a lot about this. Most of my thinking so far has centred on the frailties of human nature, particularly my own, and I am happy to report that, by trying to understand those I communicate with on the internet better as people, I have become a less argumentative (and at times abrasive) interlocutor than I used to be. But I’m no saint, and am still liable to lose my equanimity from time to time when confronted by people with whom I disagree, especially if they lack what I regard as courtesy or are trying to sell me something.

    More and more often, though, I’m beginning to wonder whether these polarities and divisions, these regular online revelations of what must surely be our worst selves to the whole wide world, are entirely our fault. I am becoming convinced that the playing-field on which we perform, like the buttress inside an Eton fives court, is affecting the rules of the game.

✸

How could that be? Here is what I think may be the matter. 

    Computers and the internet are products of digital technology, and digital technology is based on binary logic: ones and zeroes. A computer is basically nothing but a huge arrangement of switches, and each of these switches can have only two positions: ON and OFF – or, as it might be, 1 and 0, or YES and NO. All the logical operations of a computer, even the most complex and abstract, are nothing but a series of brute binary choices: this way or that way, accept or reject, true or false, yes or no. No middle ground.

    Is it coincidence, then, that our surrender to computers and the internet seems to have made us start thinking of all human questions in terms of reductive binaries, just as all problems are reduced, inside a computer, to a series of Boolean logical functions? Is it too big a stretch to think that the apparent inevitability of either total disagreement or total agreement that we find on the internet – this idiot tendency to view everything in the world as a collection of binary qualities or traits – good or evil, Left or Right, for or against – is at least partly determined by the very structure of the machines we use and the specific, highly reductive logic by which they operate? Is it possible that much of the disagreement and misunderstanding that arises when people communicate via the internet could be arising, somehow, from the very digital infrastructure that makes it all possible?

    And will it get worse as digital technology infiltrates every aspect of the world we live in? In some countries (though not, of course, in dear old Ceylon) the infiltration is almost complete. What kind of monsters shall we have become by the time it is fully accomplished? Will civilization itself still be left standing? Look at how divisions in politics, society and the global community of nations have accelerated and been exacerbated since the internet became a public utility. Look, for God’s sake, at what has happened to the United States of America...

    I am neither a philosopher nor a computer scientist. If some member of either profession – or, for that matter, any profession – could suggest a mechanism by which this digital duality might be transmitted from the infrastructure to its users, I should be very grateful indeed. And if they can show me why it can’t – show me, that is, where I am wrong, and set me straight – I would be more grateful still. Only try not to make your argument too straightforwardly black and white, or coming over the internet as it probably will, I am all too likely to disagree, reject it, and insult you into the bargain.