WINNOWED

Book Review: Chanakya’s Chant by Ashwin Sanghi

2012-02-02T04:39:00.009Z

Chanakya’s Chant has been on my reading list for some months now, but it was only last week that I managed to start on it. A very unusual book, I am yet to make up my mind how I feel about it. Should I recommend it to others or should I consign it to the heap where other bestsellers such as Amish Tripathi’s Immortals of Meluha and The Secret of the Nagas have been dumped?

The author of Chanakya’s Chant, Ashwin Sanghi has created two Chanakyas – the original one who lives in 340 BC, at the time of Alexander the Great’s invasion of India and his modern day avatar who was born as Gangasagar 2,300 years later - just before India’s independence. Both men are king makers and unashamedly so. The former wants to make Chandragupta Maurya the ruler of a united Bharat. The latter wants to make his protégée Chandini Gupta the Prime Minister of a strong India. Both Chanakya and Gangasagar are Brahmins from humble backgrounds, very shrewd and cunning manipulators who would stop at nothing to get what they want. We are told that Gangasagar was born in 1929 in Cawnpore, but, post India’s independence, Sanghi takes away the reader’s grip on dates and we never get to know the year in which Chandini Gupta becomes Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and later Prime Minister of India.

Sanghi writes well. On a comparative note, I would say that he is a far better writer than Amish Tripathi and a lot more imaginative. Chanakya’s Chant is reasonably well researched with a vast array of characters ranging from Alexander the Great and his generals to Paurus the Indian King who fought him (and lost) to scores of fictitious characters, kings, prostitutes and commoners, rich and poor, businessmen, gamblers, crooks, dacoits, goons, men, women and children, politicians and plebians. Sanghi’s descriptions are especially good. For example while describing Paurus as he faced Alexander’s army:

‘We are being attacked,’ yelled the vanguard of Kaikey’s massive army. Like an echo, the message was relayed through a series of shouts until it reached the ears of the towering Paurus. His name was derived from Purushottam – Supreme Being – and he looked nothing less than that. Standing over six and a half feet in height, the king had a radiant glow on his face that was accentuated by his curled and oiled moustache, in the typical fashion of Rajput warriors. He wore his military armour and regalia as though it were an intrinsic part of his royal personage. His muscles rippled with every move he made, his chest puffed out with muscular pride. His fair skin was wet from the rains, but each droplet clung to his frame as though it were in love with his body, refusing to let go of the physical contact. His jet-black hair hung down to his shoulders and was held in place by a ruby encrusted helmet that covered half his face. He was the mighty Paurus. Having subdued the hill kingdoms of Kashmir, Mallayrajya, Kuluta and Sindh, he was rightly entitled to the title – Parvateshwar.’

Sanghi does take a few liberties with history, especially when describing how events unfolded after Alexander the Great’s death. However, despite all that, one doesn’t get the feeling that Sanghi has mangled history, unlike in the case of Amish Tripathi’s Immortals of Meluha.

The best thing about Chanakya’s Chant is that it manages to capture the reader’s interest and hold it till the end, which takes place on the 441st page. There are minor plots roughly every five pages and Sanghi switches between the past and the present with ease and fluidity. The plots are devious and interesting, but some of them are out of the world.

On the flip side, Chanakya and Gangasagar appear to have superhuman intelligence and cunning when compared to those around them. They both win every round and that too with ease. The people around them are made out to be either duffers or in awe of Chanakya and Gangasagar. This applies even to individuals like Chandragupta. When faced with page after page of such easy victories, I was tempted to give up, but as mentioned earlier, Sanghi does manage to hold the reader’s interest and my curiosity to know how the novel ends made me read on and on.

Some of the sub-plots and sub-stories are too farfetched to be true. For example, there’s a scene where Chandini Gupta, the then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh and her secretary Shankar are driving to a meeting in interior Uttar Pradesh (the State helicopter is out of service) when they are accosted by gun wielding dacoits on horses. Chandini has two bodyguards, but they are both killed by the dacoits. However, Shankar manages to get the better of the dacoits, killing two of them and drives Chandini to the safety of a government guest house, where the telephone isn’t working. A grateful Chandini allows Shankar to make love to her. Days later, a livid Gangasagar gets Shankar killed.

Both Chanakya and Gangasagar are not only men of intelligence and cunning, but also possess a great deal of wit. Since they never explain in detail and treat everyone else as idiots, they both come across as very arrogant. Which is fine, but the frequent one-liners and PJs which they crack from time to time when asked for explanations, managed to irk me. Also, Sanghi has used quotes from over a dozen famous personalities ranging from Thomas Jefferson to de Gaulle to Mao Tse Tung to Oscar Wilde to Napoleon to Churchill. Since almost all of these sprout forth from Chanakya and Gangasagar, one gets the feeling of extreme plagiarism, which isn’t really true since all such quotes are systematically acknowledged towards the end of this novel. However, the feeling of originality which this audacious book richly deserves, is much dented on account of those borrowed quotes.

The ending comes with a surprise, one which wasn’t fully expected. I was hoping to see some action after Chandini Gupta becomes Prime Minister, something magical which she does with Gangasagar’s help, which would push India into the ranks of developed countries. Nothing of that sort happens, which makes me wonder if all that manipulation and puppetry was worth it. At least, the ancient Chanakya may legitimately claim that he unified India and gave it a strong ruler in the form of Chandragupta Maurya. There is nothing about Chandini Gupta which gives one the feeling that she is destined to be an exceptional prime minister.

Despite these various shortcomings, on balance, Chankya's Chant is an eminently readable novel.

Book Review: Aftertaste by Namita Devidayal

2012-01-25T21:36:00.006Z

The Marwari’s business acumen is legendary and the Todarmal family epitomises the typical, rich Marwari business family where every member of the family plays a role in the family business, which is headed by a shrewd and smart patriarch. However, the Todarmal family is a little bit different in one respect – it is headed by a matriarch, the formidable Bimla Kulbhushan Todarmal, aka Mummyji, who, at a time when the family was in crisis, not only conceived from scratch the mithai business, but also grew it to its present (in 1984) size and strength. Namita Deviayal’s Aftertaste revolves around the last few days of Mummyji, which happen to coincide with the Diwali of 1984 and Indira Gandhi’s assassination, with a lots of flashbacks. Mummyji has held the family together after Daddyji’s demise. Her eldest son Rajan Papa is weak and vacillating. Second son Sunny has his mother’s business acumen, but lacks the necessary human element. Eldest daughter Suman is fair, pretty and vain and wants her mother’s jewels. Saroj, the second daughter has suffered the most and is the most likeable, but even Saroj wants her mother to die, so that she can inherit her wealth.

Deviayal writes well, exceedingly well and her lyrical prose brings to the fore the Todarmal family’s love for wealth and how everything they do centres around the quest for money. Mummyji loves her children and grandson Rahul to death, but she seems to love her business and money even more. Without belittling anyone, Devidayal holds a mirror to this excessive love for money and the havoc it can wreak on relationships. The treatment of Saroj’s husband by his own family when he refuses to collaborate in a fraud, is a case in point.

There was one big fly-in-the-ointment for me in this splendid novel. There are a couple of references to chicken curry being eaten by members of the Todarmal family and a solitary reference to a breakfast of eggs. Granted, we have been told the Todarmals had settled in Punjab many generations ago, had adopted local (Punjabi) language, customs etc. and once in a while a lad is addressed as ‘puttar’, I still found the chicken curry difficult to digest. One does find Marwaris settled all over India, but one doesn’t hear of Marwaris turning non-vegetarian and eating chicken at the family dining table. Most of the time, Devidayal talks of the Todarmal children and Mummyji’s late husband Daddyji eating mithai by the kilo, along with other traditional Marwari staples such as kachoris, pooris, aloo parathas and the like. The two references to chicken curry caught me unawares and spoilt the atmosphere for me. A financially well-off carnivore in India wouldn’t eat meat once in a blue-moon - it would be eaten almost on a daily basis. If the Todarmals are non-vegetarian Marwaris who regularly eat chicken curry at home, the rest of Devidayal’s description of their culinary habits becomes grossly inaccurate.

I ought to reiterate that despite this hole, the story does hold up very well and drops the reader bang in the middle of the Todarmal household listening spellbound to a riveting tale narrated wonderfully well. Devidayal packs in a lot of detail regarding the mithai business. We are told that when the Todarmals started to make and sell mithai, Mummyji has strategically arranged for supplies of milk and sugar and ghee. We are told of Mummyji’s brilliant ideas for making barfi with Maggie and Bournvita, sweets shaped to meet Independence day and Holi themes, sweets in the shape of corporate logos, Sunny’s coup in getting varak, the silver foil used to garnish the mithai, made by a machine rather than the then prevalent ‘non-vegetarian’ method. However, I found certain important bits missing. As the business grows, one isn’t given details of how new employees are hired and managed. Except for a few references to a jalebi maker by the name Pooran, one doesn’t get a clear picture of how many employees the Todarmals have. Most importantly, there isn’t a single mention of the kitchens where the mithai is made. Is it a big central kitchen or many kitchens spread all over Bombay? Maybe it is a good thing Devidayal doesn’t get into such detail to indulge nitpickers like me – it might have spoilt the story.

Devidayal does the needful to bring in the 1980s effect. There are obligatory references to Binaca Geetmala, Gold Spot, Ambassadors, Premier Padminis, the 1971 war over Bangladesh and occasional discussions regarding Indira Gandhi and the troubles in Punjab. These are well done, but I didn’t really feel I had been transported to the 1980s. When Devidayal ends her brilliant novel, new elements are introduced to the Todarmal family – Rajan Papa befriends a Hindu fanatic who runs a Dharma Biradari, a group of upper middle-class and rich folks who do social work and meet on Sunday mornings for Bhajans and Breakfast; Grandson Rahul is a closet homosexual, to whom Mummyji has willed Cozy villa on condition that his inheritance will be only after his marriage.

At the end of it all, Aftertaste is a brilliant critique of the Todarmal’s excessive love for wealth. We are told that as the Todarmals gathered for the Diwali puja, ‘the goddess stood mute, watching the family with her ancient, painted marble eyes. How badly misunderstood she was yet again. Like her pet owl which doesn’t see during the day, these people were blind. She was not the goddess of wealth, but of well-being. She was the other side of Narayan, the god of right thinking and right action, but they worshipped only her, desperate, ignorant. .......... And so, while the priest muttered incomprehensible mantras, yet another Diwali unfolded before the Todarmal family.’

An excellent read which I would happily recommend to all and sundry without any hesitation.

Book Review – “Scammed: Confessions of a Confused Accountant” by Anonymous

2012-01-20T04:14:00.010Z

It’s always a pleasure to read a book written by an industry insider. Some months ago, I had read Puneet Gupta’s Suicide Banker which gave an intimate account of banking fraud. The main fly in the Suicide Banker’s ointment was that Gupta was not particularly savvy with his prose and I was left wondering when India would produce a Stephen Frey.

Now here comes a book written by an anonymous accountant, who will cease to be anonymous if you google the book’s title and/or read articles such as this one by The Hindu which is much better written than Gupta’s Suicide Banker. "Scammed: Confessions of a Confused Accountant" is a light read with a plot that manages to show the underbelly of India’s corporate world. Hitesh Shah, the protagonist, is a much bullied accountant who gets his big break when an impressed client offers him a CEO’s job. The new job is glamorous and pays big bucks though it carries with it a not-so-faint stink of tainted money and dirty politics. Like most other people in his position, Hitesh Shah leaps at the opportunity and as the CEO of Super Cabs, a private taxi company, is soon in the limelight. He is interviewed by TV channels and the pretty Sushma finds him attractive enough to date and live-in. The promoters of Super Cabs want aggressive growth and despite some misgivings, Hitesh largely obliges them.

Powerful people usually have powerful enemies and the political opponents of Super Cabs' promoters soon raise the temperature at Super Cabs. Not long after, there some trouble with labour unions and allegations of fraud start flying. Hitesh is left holding the can and is soon on the run. Sushma is no longer in the picture-she had ditched Hitesh some time ago, but the much more genuine Payal lends a helping hand, as do a few other genuine friends. How does it all end when Hitesh is not totally innocent since he did ignore the usual warning signs and had turned a blind eye to many questionable things? Surely this unusual book can’t have a totally happy ending? Do please read this book to find out for yourself – it’s a simple, light read, written in functional prose that would serve you well on a long train or plane journey.

Book Review: “The Average Indian Male” by Cyrus Broacha

2012-01-17T05:44:00.006Z

Everyone has heard of Cyrus Broacha. Show me an adult living in any of the Indian metros who hasn’t heard of Broacha and I will show you someone who is deaf and blind. In addition to being a stand-up comedian and a prankster, Broacha is also an actor (TV and films) and a writer. Over 2 years ago, Broacha’s first book Karl, Aaj aur Kal, a semi-autobiographical tongue-in-cheek, witty write-up about cabbages and kings, Bollywood and men in power, was released. Last year Broacha’s second book The Average Indian Male came out and it’s been on my reading list ever since.

The Average Indian Male has satire and it’s typical Broacha satire, poking fun at all and sundry, pointing out faults in a manner that has you in splits. However, it would be incorrect if I said The Average Indian Male has only satire and nothing but satire. For when Broacha pokes fun at the average Indian male, he does have an unerring aim, managing to hit all the right spots. It’s all in there – the Indian male’s propensity to hold hands (with other Indian males), to pick his nose (in the presence of other Indian males and females), to fart (also in the presence of a number of people) to stare, to pee in the open, to demand that his wife perform/provide/protect just like his mummy and to do a number of other routine things.

In addition to holding up a mirror to the average Indian male, Broacha also gently shines a light on Indian society as a whole. For example Broacha says, ‘Know your place’ is like a game – when any Indian meets a fellow Indian, we immediately decide to adopt an inferior or superior stance. A fellow Indian is either below you or above you in the social scale, never equal. Let’s look at this chart/ Father/mother, above you. Children, below you. Mr. Sharma, your neighbour, who is older, above you. Mrs. Sharma who is younger, below you.

A pigeon, below you. A cow, above you. A God you’ve heard of, definitely above you. A God you haven’t heard of, still above you. A normal building, below you. A religious structure, above you. The sun, moon and stars above you. People in a village in the Sunderbans, below you. ....... Your driver, below you. A famous driver like Lewis Hamilton, above you........’

A small number of the wise-cracks do fall flat, but that’s likely to vary from reader to reader. All in all, this a very good book, worth every paise one pays for it.

Getting Off A Virar Fast At Borivali – Launch of Urban Shots Crossroads Anthology

2012-01-13T01:17:00.004Z

In May 2011, I had submitted a short story called “Getting Off A Virar Fast At Borivali” to the Urban Stories Competition 11 jointly run by Landmark and Grey Oak. My story was shortlisted and has now been published in an anthology called “Urban Shots Crossroads”. Urban Shots Crossroads has 30 short stories in all and has been edited by Ahmed Faiyaz, author of books such as Love, Life & All That Jazz, Another Chance – Miles Apart and Scammed - Confessions of a Confused Accountant.

The Urban Shots Crossroads anthology is now available for pre-order on Flipkart.

Urban Shots Crossroads is to be launched in Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore on the following dates:

19 Jan 2012 - 7 pm, Landmark, Infiniti Mall, Andheri, Mumbai

20 Jan 2012 - 7 pm, Landmark, Phoenix Marketcity, Pune

21 Jan 2012 - 5 pm, Reliance Time Out, Cuningham Road, Bangalore

There will also be events in February in Delhi and Chennai (between 8 and 14 Feb 2012).

All are welcome to attend these events, which I am told will be graced by well-known authors and Bollywood celebrities.

Book Review: “Seal Target Geronimo – The Inside Story Of The Mission To Kill Osama Bin Laden” by Chuck Pfarrer

2012-01-10T05:37:00.008Z

I bought this book with great expectations, hoping to read a blow-by-blow account by Chuck Pfarrer, a former SEAL, of the operation by US Navy SEALS that led to the killing Osama bin Laden. Pfarrer does provide a detailed description of the planning and execution of the raid into Abbottabad. Nevertheless I was disappointed because I am not sure how much of this book is true and can be believed.

That’s right. I am not sure I can believe Pfarrer’s account and here’s why:

In addition to providing a detailed description of Operation Neptune Spear (originally called Operation Geronimo) which led to the death of Osama bin Laden, Pfarrer has provided a lot of background information about the growth Islamic fundamentalism and Muslim/Arab grievances in general and the Afghan insurgency in particular. Pfarrer starts with the creation of Israel and the Israel-Palestinian conflicts, goes on to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the contributions to the cause of the Mujahiddin by Arabs like bin Laden who were influenced by the Palestinian dispute and the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pfarrer’s description of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is remarkably fair. There are as many mentions of terrorist activities by the Irgun as there are of PLO-led terrorism. Pfarrer doesn’t shy away from stating that Israeli soldiers stood by and watched as Phalangist Christian militias carried out the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. Pfarrer actually says that Israeli soldiers fired flares to help the militias carry out their dirty work, but I am not sure if that’s factually true. Pfarrer also says that ‘It is one of the ironies of history that the most emblematic weapon of Islamic terrorism, the truck bomb, was invented not by a Muslim fundamentalist, but by a radical Jew. Menachem Begin, the son of a Russian timber merchant, came to......’ I didn’t know that the truck bomb was emblematic of Islamic terrorism. As far as I know, truck bombs have been used by the LTTE in Sri Lanka, the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh and the IRA. What gives Pfarrer the right to say that truck bombs are emblematic of Islamic terrorism? Statements such as these are only a foretaste of what’s to come.

According to Pfarrer (try not to laugh as you read this), Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction. After the US and its allies invaded Iraq, large quantities of WMD were handed over by Iraqi forces to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. This may make you wonder why there have been no attacks on coalition troops with chemical weapons. But there have been a number of such attacks, all of which failed due to a combination of the lack of skilled personnel at Al Qaeda Inc, bad luck (Al Qaeda’s) and the courage of US troops. On a number of occasions, Army’s Tech Escort Battalions whose personnel are skilled at handing nuclear and chemical disasters had to be called in to deal with chemical weapons planted by the Al Qaeda in Iraq. And why didn’t any of the newspapers or news channels report all this in detail? Because they had originally claimed that Saddam did not have WMD and hence have a vested interest in maintaining that fiction.

How did the US detect bin Laden’s location? Because bin Laben’s number two, Ayman Zawahiri betrayed bin Laden by using a courier whose cover had been blown to carry messages to bin Laden. According to Pfarrer, Zawahiri had been trying to get Osama bin Laden killed ever since the day they were fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan. It was Zawahiri who betrayed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was the main brain behind the 9/11 attacks. Why did Zawahiri do so? Because he was jealous of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who was sociable and clever and was favoured by bin Laden.

The fictions go on and on and since Pfarrer seems to make up a lot of stuff, I am not sure how much of his detailing of Operation Neptune Spear can be believed.

In addition to the various fictions inserted in this book, there is a fair amount of melodrama. When Pfarrer describes how a predator drone targeted and killed Zarqawi (whose killing had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden’s), he says: ‘Six miles above the date grove, unseen and unheard, a Predator drone, call sign Reaper Three Zero, banked at the edge of the stratosphere. It’s sensors rolled over the city below. Streetlights, car headlights, the lights of houses spread in a rolling blanket, like a mosaic of stars. The lights marked progress and peace, businesses and places where families lived. In the dark places there was poverty, frustration and anger. The dark places were where men like Zarqawi preached hatred and planned murder.’

Sometimes, certain incidents are mentioned twice, which can be irritating. For example, we are told that ‘there was almost always a pinch of Copenhagen snuff tucked into (Red Squadron’s leader) Frank Leslie’s lower lip’ We are told about the Copenhagen snuff in two different places. Ayman Zawahiri’s killing is described twice, once in melodramatic detail and later in a matter-of-fact manner.

Pfarrer does not provide any authority or reference or bibliography for his sources of information.

Pfarrer’s description of how the US Navy trains its SEALs is very good and I assume it is an accurate description, since Pfarrer is an ex-SEAL. Also, I assume that at least some of the details of Operation Neptune Spear must be true, though one turns sceptical when one reads that the US didn’t use its most stealthy stealth helicopter for this operation since it feared it might fall into Pakistani hands.

Oh and by the way, according to Pfarrer, the bomb which killed Zia-ul-Haq was planted by the KGB in retaliation for Pakistan’s support for the Mujahiddin.

Book Review: “Hello Bastar – The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement” by Rahul Pandita

2012-01-05T05:42:00.007Z

Rahul Pandita is a journalist based in Delhi and he reports for Open Magazine. Pandita has an enviable record of reporting from the frontlines of various conflict zones – Kargil, Iraq and various tribal areas in Central and Eastern India where a Maoist insurgency flourishes. It was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who in 2006 referred to Maoists ‘as the single biggest internal security challenge ever faced by this country’. It made the entire country sit up and take note. However, India’s Maoists, also referred to as Naxals, have been around since the mid-1940s when peasants in Telangana who were severely oppressed by the Nizam took to the gun. They acquired visibility when in 1967, a few disenchanted young men and women in the Naxalbari district of West Bengal picked up arms and challenged the might of the State. The Indian government has by and large treated the Naxals/Maoists as a law and order issue. Within 2 years of the Naxalbari incident, Operation Steeplechase, a combined operation of the army, paramilitary and various state police forces was launched in West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. The current Home Minister P. Chidambaram too has followed the same approach. In August 2010, a few weeks after 75 CRPF men were killed by Maoists in forests near Chintalnar-Tarmetla village in the Dantewada district of Chattisgarh, Chidambaram declared that “that the problem of Left wing extremism will be overcome in the next three years.” Chidambaram’s prediction is yet to come true and by the looks of it, is unlikely to be fulfilled in the immediate future.

Pandita’s grassroots research in the jungles of Chattisgarh, Bihar and other parts of India where the government’s authority has faded or never existed in the first place and where Maoists guerrillas (who owe allegiance to Chairman Mao and the Revolution he has espoused) rule the roost, is path breaking to say the least. Hello Bastar – The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how the Maoist insurgency has taken root in the jungles of central and eastern India. Pandita adopts a sympathetic tone as he tells us about the Maoists. The reason why Maoists have survived for so long despite so many setbacks is obvious, though Pandita does take the trouble to spell it out. Poverty, abject poverty of the sort which doesn’t exist in any other part of the world other than Sub-Saharan Africa, is the main cause for the continued existence of Maoists in India.

Initially, India’s Maoists owed outright allegiance to Chairman Mao and China. ‘China’s Chairman (Mao) is our Chairman’ was the Naxal slogan. This in a way backfired since India’s exploited peasants did not have an Indian leader who could motivate and lead them. In West Bengal, Jangal Mahal area, an organisation called Dakshin Desh was started – India being referred to as ‘Dakshin’ as opposed to China which was called 'Uttar Desh'! Do India’s Maoists still owe allegiance to modern-day China which is more capitalist than many countries in Western Europe? Pandita is not very clear on this point. Pandita also doesn’t refer to weapons or arms being provided to the Maoists by foreign countries.

Hello Bastar has detailed descriptions of various Maoists leaders which is invaluable for a student of the Maoist movement in India. One of the leaders so described, Kishenji, was killed by the CRPF in November 2011. Many of the Maoist leaders described by Pandita - men and women like Kobad Ghandy and Anuradha Ghandy nee Shanbag - come across as committed individuals who are much more concerned about improving the lives of tribals and other marginalised people than in imposing Maoist rule in India. Pandita does make references to killings and massacres carried out by Maoists, but Pandita doesn’t show them to have ruthlessness that is in anyway comparable to the legendary ruthlessness of men like Mao Tse Tung or Chou En Lai.

Pandita makes the very valid point, something which the Maoists themselves are aware of, that they have made very little headway in urban areas, though most large Indian cities have huge slums and a very large percentage of people live in those squalid slums. Then, why is it that Maoists haven’t been able to make their presence felt in India’s urban settings which have so much poverty and inequality? Also, why haven’t the Maoists been able to attract college students the way they used to in the 60s and 70s? Pandita asks Ganapathi, a Maoist leader, whether he thinks Maoist movement will ever be as successful in Gurgaon as in Giridih (a Maoist stronghold in Jharkhand). He replied: “All the riches between Giridih and Gurgaon have been produced by people from poor areas like Giridih. It is the poor Dalit and Adivasi labourers who are spilling their sweat and blood for the construction of huge mansions and infrastructure by Indian and foreign corporate lords. The majority of the workers and employees who work in the shopping malls and companies are from these areas. In terms of social, economic and cultural ties or in terms of movement relations, Gurgaon and Giridihs are not two unconnected islands as such. They both are influencing each other. This is creating a strong base for our extension. If Giridih is liberated first, then basing on its strength and on the struggles of the working class in Gurgaon, Gurgaon will be liberated later." To me, this statement sounded farfetched. Places like Giridih have been ‘liberated’ by the Maoists for many decades, but they have had little bearing on the various Gurgaons of India. Pandita comments ‘that may be a far cry, but not as far as it may sound to the government.’

Book Review: “We Of The Mountains - Armenian Short Stories”

2012-01-03T02:48:00.017Z

I inherited this short story collection from my Dad. Nineteen stories in all, published by, who else? Progress Publishers, some of them just three pages long and some, over two dozen. I read this collection for the first time when I was thirteen or so and I reckon I must have read it at least half a dozen times so far. Recently I re-read this collection or rather, skimmed through it. Some of the stories are written prior to the Communist takeover of Armenia and the rest are set in Soviet Armenia. Many deal with the transition to Soviet rule, a couple are set during the Second World War and a few tell the story of youth, love and ennui in Soviet Armenia.

Many of the authors are men who have never lived outside Armenia. A few have, like Derenik Demirchian (1877-1956) the son of a poor shopkeeper who trained as a teacher in Switzerland or like Gegam Sevan who was born in Istanbul where he studied law and lived in Libya, serving the Communist Party of Libya, before moving to Armenia. One of the authors, Abig Avakian, was born in Teheran, educated at the American college there and served in the Iranian Air Force. He migrated to Armenia in 1946. Some were involved in the fight to make Armenia communist and underwent punishment and suffering under the Tsar. For example, Avetik Isaakian was arrested for activity against the Tsarist regime and imprisoned at Tiflis. A few fought for the Soviet Union in the Second World War.

Almost all of the stories describe the beauty of Armenia, especially the mountainous parts. In “The Alpine Violet”, Aksel Bakunts tells us that “The top of Mt. Kagavaberda is draped in clouds the year round. White drifts hide the jagged walls of the castle, with tall black towers emerging here and there. From afar it seems that sentries are patrolling the ramparts, that the great iron doors of the castle are locked and that at any moment a guard might a stranger scaling the mountain.

But when the wind scatters the clouds and the white shreds dissolve, first the leaning top of a tower appears and then the overgrown walls, half-buried in the earth. There are no iron gates, there are no sentries.

Silence reigns over the ruins of Kagavaberda. The only sound is that of the turbulent Basut in the canyon below as it rushes along, polishing the blue quartz of the narrow bedrock. It seems that a thousand wolfhounds are howling beneath the churning waters, gnawing away at their iron chains.”

However, the description of nature’s beauty is interspersed with descriptions of human behaviour which is not always particularly beautiful. In the village from where beautiful Kagavaberda can be seen, a peasant has come home from a hard day’s labour, only to find that his wife has had some visitors in his absence. ‘Jealousy, like a bolt of lightning, rent the peasant’s seething soul. He opened his eyes wide. He turned pale. The woman looked at her son and flushed; her husband noticed the colour rising to her cheeks. The next moment he was on his feet. His hairy hands grabbed the heavy staff and brought it down across the woman’s back.’

Avetik Isaakian’s “Saadi’s Last Spring” is similar to “The Alpine Violet”. Nature is described in words that are equally beautiful and human emotions do not play second fiddle.

In “The Flowering Of A Book”, Derenik Demirchian takes us to the world of Zvart, a youngster with a very wild imagination and a philosophical and poetic outlook. Zvart has been consigned to an abbey by his parents who were convinced that he is mad. The Abbot is a good man and he treats Zvart kindly, allowing his genius to flourish, though the other monks, with the exception of Gunkianos, hate him. After the Abbot’s death, Zvart is imprisoned by the jealous monks, but before Zvart dies with a smile on his lips, his thoughts are converted into a book, with paintings by the talented Tade. The book now has to be kept safe.

“Night had fallen. Winter had set in over the mountains of Armenia. It was piercingly cold. The sky was as a frozen pane of glass. Gunkianos made his way down the slope. There was a bundle over his shoulder, and he carried a book wrapped in a silk handkerchief. His fingers were numb with cold, but he would not have let go of the book even if his hand had withered.

Gunkianos had run away from the monastery. His one aim was to save the book at any cost. If only he succeeded.... He did not know where he was going. A terrible storm raged over the mountains. The valleys swarmed with soldiers. Cities, villages, monasteries and libraries were all put to the torch.

By morning the storm had thrown a white blanket over the mountains the gorges. An old monk coming out of an ancient monastery discovered a half-frozen man with a sack over his shoulder by the gates. Beside him was an open book, the blue sky smiling up from its pages.

The old monk picked it up reverently.”

The stories written prior to the communist takeover give an idea of the sort of life Armenians led, one interrupted by war and Turkish invasions. Travellers always got a hearty welcome and a bed for the night.

In Rafael Aramian’s story “She Took A Pitcher And Went For Water” an Abbot spending the night with strangers introduces himself thus:

“I’m Armenian,” he said stirring the soup.

“I can see that.”

“I’m from Kutaii, the son of Gevork and Takui Sogomonyan. I’m an abbot. My name is Komitas.”

I wonder if Armenians still introduce themselves by giving the names of their parents? Most probably not! Komitas the abbot is forced to make a second trip to the same village and stay at the same house, this time to inform his host that her son died in a faraway land and would not return. “May the earth over his grave in a foreign land be light,” the dead man’s mother tells Komitas with tears in her eyes.

In a similar vein, with lots of old world charm and a heavy rustic touch, Abig Avakian’s “The Last Line” tells the story of Gegam, a man who hails from the Van region of Turkey. Driven away from Van by marauding Turks who killed his father and sisters, Gegam went to Persia where he ran a mill. One rainy night, there was a knock on the mill door. Outside, he found Tuti a gypsy girl. Turks in blue pantaloons stood on the opposite bank. One of them shouted, “Hey miller! Chase the girl out before we wreck your place!”

Gegam wanted to shout back, “Just you try! I know you dogs! I’m from Van. I saw you wreck our home, shoot Kha-chatur-airik and drag my sisters into the cellar!”

But could he say all that?

Swinging his axe instead, he shouted, “Just you try to wreck my house! I’ll make such a mess of you, your ancestors will turn in their graves!”

The men on the far bank held a whispered conference and then one of them shouted, “We’ll remember that miller.

Gegam wanted to marry Tuti, but Father Hovannes refused to marry them since Tuti was not a Christian. Nevertheless Gegam took Tuti as his common-law wife and she bore him three strapping sons before she died. Turks in blue pantaloons destroyed Gegam’s mill and so, as noted in Gegam’s diary “In July 1946, we set out for the heavenly land that is called Mother Armenia.”

Interestingly, as mentioned above, Abig Avakian, the author of this story was born in Teheran and he migrated to Armenia in 1946.

Houvannes Toumanian (1869-1923), one of the most reputed among Armenian writers, is considered the Armenian equivalent of Pushkin. His story “My Friend Neso” is a brilliant portrayal of the inequities of society - before the Revolution of course. Neso is a popular lad, like by all and admired for his story-telling. However, when the village had a school, Neso’s father couldn’t afford to send him to school.

Toumanian tells us that I can still hear Neso’s wail as he rolled in the dust and cried: “I want to go to school, too!”

And I can still hear his father’s voice shouting: “For God’s sake, can’t you understand! I don’t have the money! If I had three rubles, I’d buy grain with it, so’s you wouldn’t all be hungry. I don’t have the money!”

Many years later, the narrator finds Neso tied up in the village square, about to be flogged for thievery. The narrator intervenes and saves him, but ‘cannot forget little Neso sitting on the logs on moonlit nights, telling us stories. Neso, so pure and sweet. Neso my childhood friend.’

Stefan Zorian is one of the Founders of Soviet Armenian Literature and his story “The Girl From The Library” is a classic tale of the Revolution. Victoria Danelian is an educated girl working in a library whilst her mother is a household help who pays regular obeisance to her masters and the priests. The story is narrated by Victoria’s mother who is slowly educated in the ways of the revolution.

“What sort of holiday is May Day?” Victoria’s mother asks Victoria. Mind you, this is just before the Revolution.

“May Day is the working people’s holiday. Workers all over the world are celebrating today. Right now, this very minute, workers in all the cities of Europe and America are gathering together.

On May Day, Victoria makes a speech in front of a crowd of workers. “Comrades! Everything that’s been said here is a pack of lies because these gentlemen’s words have nothing to do with their deeds. They say that all working people must unite, but they don’t want to unite with the Russian workers who are fighting for the happiness of all working people."

Victoria’s speech gets her into trouble and soon she is arrested. Her mother is ridiculed by the Landlord and his family for Victoria’s Party activities. ‘How could you have given birth to a traitor?’ she is asked by Landlord Mikhak’s wife. Victoria’s mother turns to different quarters for help, but if rebuffed everywhere. Finally she goes to the priest, Father Barseg, who also tells her that Victoria is a traitor. She walks away thinking, ‘That’s a priest for you. He always said that we must help the poor, but here I am, in trouble, and he’s turned his back on me. That’s a holy man for you.’ This is slightly melodramatic stuff, but is still very well written.

Victoria’s mother often visits Victoria in prison until Victoria is transferred to a larger prison in Yerevan. Can Victoria’s mother make it to Yerevan? Of course she can, with help from two kind men who are actually secret Party workers. In Yerevan she stays with Artush, another kind stranger, who is also a Party worker. Then one day the Bolsheviks manage to take over the Government and there is much rejoicing among workers. Artush and Victoria’s mother set out for the jail. ‘There was a crowd carrying banners outside the prison. One of the men had climbed a box and was addressing the prisoners leaving the jail. “Comrades you have been through much suffering and deprivation......"

Just as “The Girl From The Library” is the story of the civil movement that assisted the Bolshevik takeover, “On the Mountain” is the story of the war between the Dashnak army which controlled the short-lived Democratic Republic of Armenia (1917-1920) and the Soviet Bolsheviks that led to the communist conquest of Armenia. The Dashnaks are the villains in the story, making a last stand on the cliffs of Agara Gorge against Soviet forces who have reached the left bank of the Agara. In the Dashnak headquarters, a peasant who refused to fight the Soviets is being whipped. Captain Enoch Agamian is shouting into the phone: “Is this the switchboard? Get me Khanatsakh. That you Barkhudar? Have you sent off the transport? What?!” Enoch grabbed his gun and waved it at the phone, as if he were threatening the man. “Are you mad? What do you mean ‘it’s impossible’? Are you just sitting there, waiting for the Bolsheviks? Listen to me, you’re asking for trouble. The Bolsheviks won’t shoot you, I will! D’you hear me? I’ll take care of you myself. Send ten wagons of provisions 'out to us before dawn. And another thing: shoot the poor peasants. The rich ones will be glad to bring us all they have. That’s all!” As in most Soviet era literature, there are no grey zones. The Bolsheviks are all that’s good and saintly and the Dashnaks, who were actually half-decent nationalists, are shown to be purely evil.

Stepan is another peasant, the hero of the story, who is on top of Eagle Mountain (which is why the story is called “On the Mountain”) watching the Dashnaks who hold the cliffs of Agara Gorge keep the brave Soviet forces at bay. The Dashnaks don’t have heavy artillery, but their machine guns keep the Soviet troops down in their trenches. ‘The Communists fired their big gun at the peaks; the canyons shuddered and echoed like the big empty pitcher in his room; everything was enveloped in clouds of rust-coloured dust. When the dust settled the untouched positions of the Dashnaks came into view again, and once again the machine-gun began coughing viciously, keeping the men down..........He placed his sheepskin hat under his rifle and took careful aim. Then he held his breath, waiting for the cannon to roar so that the Dashnaks would not hear the sound of his shot. The cannon roared and Stepan fired. The Dashnak in the grey sheepskin hat fell heavily on the machine-gun........Stepan pressed his chin into his interlaced fingers and watched the Red Army men jumping out of the trenches and rushing towards the gorge. A machine-gun rattled in the distance, and the one that had been silenced began coughing fire again...........This time Stepan did not wait for the cannon to roar. He fired and the machine gun choked and was silent.....................’

Stepan hesitated for a moment and then fired again, this time at the Dashnak commander. He cursed softly for having missed. The Dashnaks spotted him and opened fire from all sides. A thud in his shoulder sent a sharp pain through his body.

The canyon resounded with the battle cry of the men in green army shirts who had broken through to the mountain valley and were running with a red banner, the colour of the sun rising over the mountain, billowing above them. ' I wonder if Bolshevik forces anywhere have charged at an enemy carrying a red banner, but then “Enemy At The Gates” does have a scene showing Soviet troops carry a red banner as they charge at the troops of the Third Reich, so maybe they did do so.

Movses Arazi’s “Comrade Mukuch” is the story is a poor watchman whose life changes after Soviet rule is introduced. At the beginning of the story, Mukuch is dressed in rags and shoes that are held together by bits of string, nails or wire. One day a piece of leather goes missing in the factory and Mukuch is accused of theft by the new factory manager. A nervous Mukuch attends an enquiry, prepared for the worst. ‘Mukuch’s eyes came to rest on a large portrait of Lenin on the wall. They say he’s a good man. If only he was here now and could help me, I wouldn’t be in such a mess.’

A bell tinkled, bringing the meeting to order. People were getting up to speak, but Mukuch did not follow their words. He came to with a start, when a worker named Saak began to speak. Saak had a loud voice and his words were easy to understand. How angry he was today. It seemed that he was breathing fire. Naturally he was angry at Mukuch. How strange though: Saak had just said, “Comrade Mukuch”? If he was angry with him, why did he call him “Comrade Mukuch”? That was a term of respect. Moreover, the (new) manager was on pins and needles all during Saak’s speech. He kept jumping to his feet, raising his hand to reply and finally stalked out, red in the face, muttering to himself.................Now again, someone else had referred to him as “Comrade Mukuch”. Yes, they were praising him. Despite the hunger and cold, Mukuch is always on the job, like a soldier at his post............... No, there could be no doubt about it. They were all helping him, they were all defending him! The chains that bound his heart burst. He had been frozen when he entered the building, but now he felt warm all over.'

The narrator next meets Mukuch three years later at a workers’ meeting. He is now clean shaven and his old clothes and shoes have been sent to a museum. Comrade Mukuch makes a speech in support of the revolution that is greeted with applause.

Rachia Kochar’s “Thirst” is set during the Second World War when ‘the earth trembled from gun volleys’. “Thirst” reminded me of Mikhail Sholokhov’s writings set in the Second World War. Mikael, the hero of “Thirst” is forever in danger, always surviving by the skin of his teeth. The Red Army is in retreat until the long-awaited hour strikes and the Soviet army begins a massive counter-offensive that would not be stopped by any force on earth.’ Does Mikael survive? Do please read this story and find out.

Vigenn Khechumian’s “The Bridge” tells the story of Chief mason Navasard who waits for his son to return from the War. Navasard’s family has built stone bridges for generations and the Chief mason cannot wait for his son Armenak to return so that he can hand over the bridge building to him. Armenak does return, but brings with him a Russian wife and son. To add to Navasard’s irritation, his son praises steel bridges, which are supposedly lighter and stronger than stone bridges. This moving tale is the story of how Navarsard adjusts to his daughter-in-law and modernity and accepts his grandson.

Sero Khanzadian’s “The White Lamb” is a heart-rending tale of a gardener named Navarsard (named just as in Vigenn Khechumian’s “The Bridge” where the Chief mason is also called Navarsard), whose son is a big shot in Moscow and hasn’t come home for ten years. One day, Navarsard hears from a fellow villager that Arshak has returned to the village. As the father rushes home to greet his son, various villagers tell the father that they have seen Arshak, that he is driving a blue sedan, that he is with the village Chairman etc. The father gathers various things, such as a honey comb and fresh figs, which his son used to love and prepares to slaughter a lamb. However, Arshak drives away from the village without meeting his father.

Mkrtich Sarkisian’s “How You’ve Changed Girls” could have been set in any modern society when the young are generally allowed to fall in love and marry the person of their choice, but where social status and parental expectations do play a role in pairings. That it is set in a collective farm in Soviet Armenia and that the pretty girl is the only child of the Chairman and the young man the son of ordinary workers only make this story more interesting.

Mkrtich Armen’s story “The Girl Who Looked For Me” reminds me of “D”, a story I recently read in Deepti Naval’s collection of short stories - The Mad Tibetan – Stories From Then And Now. Ruben is walking aimlessly along a street when a pretty girl walks up and demands to know why Ruben hasn’t kept in touch. Do remember, this story was written before the advent of emails and mobile phones. “The Girl Who Looked For Me” has an ending that is very different from “D”. When the girl walks away from Ruben after extracting a promise to keep in touch, Ruben still hasn’t managed to remember her.

Gegam Sevan’s “The Swallows Were Flying Low” is the story of Levon, a man who enjoys life. Narrated by Levon’s nephew, we hear Levon tell him, ‘Eat. I told you. Never hesitate to take the joys life offers. Grab them and don’t waste time on thinking about it for God’s sake. If you’ve found something, take it. And never refuse anything. Now fresh-fried fish with vodka and onions, that is, if you eat with your hands, hear, only with your hands, is also one of life’s joys.’ Levon takes his nephew fishing in the sea and they are caught in a storm. They survive of course and despite that ordeal, the narrator is left with happy memories of the sea, sun and life.

Vardkes Petrosian’s “Good Morning, Jack” is the story of Arsen, the wastrel son of a hard working father, who has a brief affair with a girl named Mary. Arsen loafs around, lies to Mary that he has a job on the night shift, gives his name as Jack and has fun for a while, till he realises that he has fallen in love. Arsen then backs out and walks away. We don’t get to know what exactly Arsen’s father does, save that he works at a plant and has a driver. The dialogues could have come from young people anywhere in the world in the 1970s and this story gives one a feel of middle-class Soviet Armenian society.

Khazak Giulnazarian’s “The Sixth Commandment” is yet another love story. Unlike “Good Morning, Jack”, here the girl rejects the soon-to-be-famous poet and doesn’t seem to be any worse for it.

In all, this is a splendid read for anyone who enjoys Soviet–era literature or wants to get a feel of Armenia before the collapse of communism.

Imran Khan The Politician

2011-12-26T17:29:00.001Z

Imran Khan is making waves in Pakistan these days. Once written off as a man of no consequence in Pakistan’s political arena, hamstrung by what Anatol Lieven describes as an inability to distribute largesse, Khan has managed to draw over 100,000 people to an anti-corruption rally in Karachi

Khan had achieved a similar feat in Lahore in October 2011 and the repeat performance has confirmed that Khan has arrived on the political scene.

Recently I had read Khan’s book “Pakistan: A Personal History” where Khan mentions an anecdote which describes his personality well. Apparently when Khan was four years old, his cousins took him to a swimming pool at the Aitchison College in Lahore. Khan was seeing people swim for the first time and ‘could see that people seemed to be moving around near the surface of the water so I decided it must be quite shallow and promptly threw off my clothes and jumped straight in. I immediately sank to the bottom. After swallowing a lot of water, I was taught by my cousins to swim within a few days.’ Based on this experience, Khan says that, ‘Politics was a similar experience, though the learning process was much longer. I had nobody to teach me, no mentors and made many mistakes.’

Has Khan learnt to play politics just as he learnt to swim? We’ll find out when the next general elections are held in 2013. However, it cannot be denied that currently Imran Khan’s political views – negotiating with the Taliban and ending drone strikes – coincides with the views of Pakistan’s all powerful army.

“Pakistan: A Personal History” by Imran Khan – Book Review

2011-12-23T16:39:00.013Z

Almost two years ago, I had blogged about Imran Khan and my comments weren’t exactly very flattering to the former captain of Pakistan’s world cup winning squad.

I have now just finished reading a book by Imran which combines Pakistan’s history with Khan’s own story. Khan writes well and tells a simple story of how Pakistan has evolved since its independence, the challenges it faces and how Khan’s political party Tehreek-e-Insaf can offer a credible alternative to the established parties. One may not agree with everything that Khan has to say, but one is forced to admit that Khan has passion, drive and determination for his cause.

Khan has a view on a number of issues, ranging from Pakistan’s founders Jinnah and Iqbal to the Taliban to the path which Pakistan should take to get out of the morass it is currently in. Hardly surprising, I guess, otherwise Khan wouldn’t be in politics or write a book for that matter. Khan comes across as a conservative man, one very proud of his Pathan origins, his religion worn on his sleeve. I initially thought Pakistan: A Personal History would be addressed to and meant for young Pakistanis, ones who would vote in the next elections, but no, by the time I finished this book, I got the feeling that Khan was trying to explain Pakistan to the West, to ask for greater understanding (not sympathy- Khan is too proud for that) and respect.

The broad contours of Khan’s story would be known to most people in the sub-continent. As a youngster, Khan had a privileged childhood, went to one of the best schools in Pakistan, had a dream career playing international cricket for Pakistan, led Pakistan to its one and only world cup victory, built a world-class cancer hospital in memory of his mother with public donations, got married to the very pretty and very young Jemima, got into politics, initially made a hash of things, got divorced and has managed to stick around in the political arena till now. Mind you, there isn’t too much about Khan’s rise to fame and glory in cricket, other than occasional references to various incidents, both good and bad ones. If one expects a cricketing biography, one’s going to be disappointed.

Similarly there isn’t much about his courtship of Jemima. Khan tells us that he was all set for an arranged marriage when he met Jemima. He doesn’t use the words ‘fall in love” though he does say that he ‘found her attractive and intelligent and was particularly impressed by her strong value system and the fact that despite her young age she already had a spiritual curiosity.' I though Khan’s account of the reasons for their divorce much more honest and straightforward. I’d say this book is 8/10th about politics and ideology, 1/10th about cricket and the remaining 1/10th is other personal stuff.

There are quite a few interesting anecdotes about Khan. One is set during the 1965 War with India when Pakistanis expected the Indian army to land in Lahore where Khan lived. Some of Khan’s older cousins formed a junior defence league and were armed with guns. Two of Khan’s ‘overzealous cousins almost ambushed, shot and killed two innocent people, mistaking them for Indian paratroopers.’ It is not cleared if the two innocents were “killed” or “almost killed”. There is no mention of any punishment and so I presume it was only “almost killed”, but then you never know in Pakistan. There is another story of how Khan’s tips helped his brother-in-law Ben Goldsmith, who had lost about 10,000 pounds spread betting on cricket, recoup his losses. After the losses were recouped, Ben made enough money (in two days) for Khan to pay off his party’s debts. Mind you, Khan says he never gambled in his life till then and there is no mention of Khan repeating such a performance.

Khan mentions how Zia declared the Ahmediyas to be non-Muslims, but doesn’t comment either in support or against that declaration. Clearly, Khan doesn’t want to lose any votes over this issue. However, in the matter of Salman Taseer's murder, he takes a clear stand calling it tragic. Khan also takes the view that Tasser’s assassination and the subsequent killing of Shahbaz Bhatti is a result of the polarisation in Pakistan brought about by Pakistan’s involvement in the War on Terror. ‘Before 9/11, Taseer’s remarks recommending a change to the blasphemy law in order to prevent its misuse might not have even got a mention in the newspapers. At worst they might have roused a few statements by clerics wanting to mobilise public support among their constituencies, but in the current polarised climate everyone and anyone is at risk if they happen to be on the wrong side of the divide.’

Khan goes out of his way to explain Islam, Pakistan and the Pashtuns (who can do no wrong) to the outside world, sticking his neck out in the process. Most of what Khan has to say is sensible and correct – to an extent atleast, such as that Islam has had a glorious past when it produced a number of scientists and geometricians and the like (when the West wallowed in darkness), that a genuine Islamic state would necessarily be a welfare state which would tolerate minorities, that the Taliban were fundamentalists, but never terrorists, that no Pakistani had taken part in the 9/11 attacks, that the Taliban could have been persuaded to have Osama bin Laden tried in an Islamic court of law, that it is still possible to make an honourable peace with the Taliban. Khan leaves one in no doubt that if his party comes to power, the Pakistani army will stop participating in the War on Terror. Khan doesn’t want Pakistan to get American aid, he feels it makes Pakistan aid-dependent and most of the aid money lines the pockets of the rich and powerful.

When Khan talks of the honour system, yes the very same idea which causes fathers to kill their daughters who fall in love before marriage, he says, ‘the concept of honour has received a bad press because of the deeply offensive honour killings, but by upholding one’s honour impoverished people living hard lives can maintain a sense of dignity and command respect. In the tribal area, the highly decentralized form of democracy is based on the jirga system – local councils of village elders, similar to the Athenian democracy of the city-states of......’ I’m going to leave this at that.

Again when Khan talks of opposition to women’s liberation, we are told, ‘While the masses in Pakistan are impressed by the tremendous technological progress of the Western world, their understanding of the Western moral value system mainly comes from watching television and they do not respect what they see. Therefore they are deeply suspicious of any attempt towards westernization – particularly women’s liberation. They don’t regard this as women having the right to fulfil their potential, but rather as having the right to be sexually permissive. Therefore westernised Pakistanis are considered to have loose morals too. One of the many derogatory things which people say about westernized couples is that "he does not get angry and she has no shame." It is because of this attitude that sometimes modernization is resisted because it is perceived to be westernization. People are also therefore wary of foreign NGOs dealing with women.’

Khan’s sense of righteousness and destiny shine forth brightly, as Khan discusses Pakistan’s current political dilemma and the role he would play if he could win political power. We find statements like ‘that left only my party and the religious parties to take a stand.’ Khan wants Pakistan to ‘reclaim the vision and wisdom of the modernist reformers who paved the way for the creation of Pakistan. We need to do this because we badly need a cultural, intellectual and moral renaissance in Pakistan so that we are able to create societies and communities that are educated and enlightened, just and compassionate, forward-looking and life-affirming. We need to utilize our rational faculties and engage in scholarly discussion and reflection to find a solution to contemporary issues such as the blending of the positive aspects of Western culture with Islam. The new renaissance must also offer an alternative to the Western materialism and consumerism that has been totally imbibed by our ruling classes and which our country cannot afford.’

Khan is quite clear that it is the current ruling classes of Pakistan who are at the root of Pakistan’s misery. Not only do they covet foreign aid money, which they then siphon off, they also ape the West and do not subscribe to the values which Pakistan’s founders had espoused. The English language schools of Pakistan, which follow a curriculum different from that of state schools come in for some severe criticism for creating brown sahibs. ‘When Pakistan became independent, we should have rid ourselves of these English medium schools,’ Khan sermonises and then adds, ‘in other post-colonial countries such as Singapore, India and Malaysia, they set up one core syllabus for the whole country.’ I can’t speak for Singapore, and Malaysia, but Khan should have done some more research on India before making such a flattering statement. If India had done away with all English language schools, yours truly would not be posting this piece on Winnowed and Khan would not have written Pakistan: A Personal History in English if Pakistan had done away with all its English language schools.

Khan doesn’t want Pakistan to have the Western form of secularism. While noting that ‘Islam gives all the freedom of a secular society – yet an Islamic state cannot be secular. To understand secularism as it exists in the West today, it is important to remember the evolution of Christianity within the Roman Empire. When the Roman Empire became Christian, the State and the Church had their distinct boundaries. Over the centuries, many other influences have shaped modern-day secularism. But the separation of Church and State could not happen in Islam since it has no concept of a Church.’ I don’t think the Church and State were so distinct during the days of early Christianity. Also, I don’t see how Islam not having a Church should prevent the State from disassociating itself from religion. Khan does offer an explanation by quoting Iqbal who said that ‘when a State is governed without the moral values that are rooted in religion then naked materialism is likely to replace it – exactly the observation made by Mohandas Gandhi when he remarked, ‘those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.’ The two greatest institutional tyrannies of all times, the Nazi Reich and the Soviet Union, were Godless constructs.’

Khan ends his 364-page (sans le index) tome on the most positive note, telling us that his political party Tehreek-e-Insaf is the only party which can get Pakistan out of its current desperate crisis. ‘For the first time I feel Tehreek-e-Insaf is the idea whose time has come,’ Khan tells us.

“Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War” by Sarmila Bose – Book Review

2011-12-19T05:24:00.009Z

I’ve always wondered why India and Bangladesh aren’t better friends than they are. I mean, when soldiers from West Pakistan were carrying out a genocide in what’s now Bangladesh, one which caused the deaths of a few million Bengalis, India stepped in and helped the Bengalis gain independence, losing a few thousand of its soldiers in doing so. Why then do so many Bangladeshis want to have, as good a relationship with Pakistan as with India? Why are so many Bangladeshis friendlier towards Pakistan than towards India? Why is the Bangladesh National Party able to flourish in Bangladesh, even gaining power on a few occasions, despite being inimical towards India and friendlier towards Pakistan and despite being allied with the Jamaat-e-Islami which had collaborated with West Pakistan and opposed Bangladeshi independence? All these questions I had raised in this post dated March 2009.

I just finished reading a brilliant book by Sarmila Bose, a research fellow at Oxford, which has provided me with the answers I have been searching for so long. Of course, the answers provided by Dead Reckoning: Memories of the 1971 Bangladesh War do raise further questions, but it is a very good start in getting a fix on what exactly happened in the run-up to Bangladesh’s independence, something which ought to have been done decades ago.

Bose questions many of the commonly held assumptions relating to the events of 1971 which led to Bangladesh’s independence. Was there actually a genocide by troops from West Pakistan against the Bengalis of East Pakistan? Were the Bengalis entirely innocent victims and were Pakistani federal troops the only aggressors, as portrayed by most media sources? Finally and most importantly, how many people died in those turbulent times? Did three million Bengalis actually die at the hands of troops from West Pakistan? Did India actually hold 93,000 Pakistani soldiers as PoWs?

Bose tries to answer these questions by analysing various events that took place during that period, especially the massacres and interviewing various participants in those events, taking the trouble to meet with Pakistanis, Bengali fighters, Bengali civilians and non-Bengali civilians as she seeks to find if commonly accepted wisdom is indeed true. For example, in order to verify details of the attack on Dacca University on the night of 25th- 26th March 1971 which is supposed to have resulted in the deaths of 300 innocent students and professors who were killed in cold blood, some in their dormitories as they slept and some rounded up and executed in the University grounds, Bose interviewed army officers such as Lt. Muhammad Ali Shah of 18 Punjab who took part in the attack, studied tape recordings of radio communications among Pakistani army officers during the attack (which are preserved at the Liberation War Museum in Dacca) and reviewed documents prepared by the US consulate in Dacca. The attack on Dacca University is particularly infamous since one Professor Nurul Ula managed to films some of the killings and this footage is actually available on YouTube. Bose found that the students at Dacca University were armed and had trained for battle. The training was mainly with dummy rifles and the students’ weaponry was of course no match for that of the soldiers’, but the fact is that it was not a massacre of sleeping victims, but a two-way battle. Soldiers enroute to the University had to clear barricades of felled trees and on reaching the University, there was some initial resistance before the soldiers prevailed.

During the attack on Dacca University, Rokeya Hall, the Women’s hostel is supposed to have been attacked, with girl students having to jump out of their hostel windows to reach safety. Bose’s research shows that most girl students had vacated their hostel by 25th March and only 7 girls were left, all of whom stayed with a tutor on the night of the attack and survived. Some like Professor Guhathakurta and Professor Maniruzzaman were taken away from their homes inside the campus and killed. One Rabindra Mohan Das, whose father worked in the Provost’s office, and whose entire family was killed, tells Bose that 29 staff members were ordered to pile up corpses and were later killed. Rabindra Mohan Das and another boy were spared since they were considered too young. Brig (Lt.Col) Taj who commanded the 32 Punjab regiment told Bose that by his estimates, only 44 people were killed in the two main halls targetted. However, records of radio communication between officers who took part in the attack indicate that no prisoners were taken and that around 300 people were killed. The memorial at Dhaka University for the University’s faculty, students and staff who lost their lives during 1971 has only 149 names and so the number of faculty, students and staff who died that night has to be even less. Bose wonders what the real number is? Did the army men exaggerate casualties or were there fighters in the campus who were not students? Finally, Bose pertinently asks why the alleged mass grave outside Jagannath Hall wasn’t exhumed after the liberation?

The conclusions which Bose comes to are rather startling. According to Bose, the movement for Bangladesh’s independence was hardly peaceful or Gandhian, as claimed by many. Bengalis who were agitating for more rights and for freedom were usually armed with weapons ranging from rifles to sickles. In other words, they were not a peaceful bunch. From 1 March 1971 when the elected national assembly was postponed till the time the Pakistani army launched Operation Searchlight on 25 March 1997, violent Bengali mobs and rebel fighters targeted Pakistani soldiers and their families and killed many. Despite this, federal troops exercised a certain degree of restraint. There were a number of massacres of Biharis which could be called genocide, especially because those killings did not discriminate between men women and children. On the contrary, when federal Pakistani troops massacred Bengalis, they usually let women and children go. Local Bengali Muslims were responsible for many of the Hindus who were killed or chased away from their homes. Greed for wealth and property was the prime motive for such actions. Many Bengali intellectuals killed just before the surrender by General Niazi died at the hands of collaborating Bengali outfits such as Al-Badr and Al-Shams (both commonly called Razakars) and not Pakistani troops.

Did India actually take 93,000 PoWs? The total number of Pakistani soldiers in East Pakistan was only 34,000, plus another 11,000 civilian police and other armed personnel. India is right in saying it had 93,000 Pakistanis in its custody, but this figure Bose tells us, included civilian officials, civilian staff, woman and children. Pakistan’s President and Chief Martial Law Administrator Gen. Yahya Khan is given a clean chit by Bose who finds him ‘sensitive to Bengali grievances’. Bose reminds her readers that Gen. Yahya Khan actually ensured that the elections held were free and fair, thereby enabling the Awami League to win a majority.

Finally and most importantly Bose concludes that the total death toll from Bangladesh’s independence movement was neither 3 million Bengalis as claimed by Mujibur Rahman and as accepted by almost everyone outside Pakistan, nor was it as 26,000 as estimated by the Hamoodur Rehman Commission, but between fifty to one hundred thousand and in this figure, Bose includes Bengalis, Biharis, Pakistani and Indians. If the Pakistanis had actually killed 3 million Bengalis or any other number close to it, one can be sure that Bangladeshis and Pakistanis would not be on good terms now. So many Bengalis would not have collaborated with the Pakistanis to the extent they did. We are given the example of two brothers, both of whom were in the Pakistani army. One brother, Maj. Gen. Imamuz Zaman of the Bangladesh army, defected to the rebels and the other, Brigadier Abul Lais Ahmaduz Zaman continued to be loyal to Pakistan. Both officers continue to serve their respective countries.

One can dispute Bose’s numbers on the basis that she has placed a great deal of reliance on her interviews with Pakistani army officers. Also, some of Bose’s suggestions and inferences can be challenged. For example, while investigating a massacre at Thanapara village, on the banks of the Padma, where a number of villagers had gathered, Bose tells us that before the shooting, the Pakistanis had accused the villagers of being Indians who had crossed over and explains that Thanapara is very close to the Indian border and at the time of the massacre, the water level was very low, making it possible to easily cross-over. However, we are also told that the men were segregated from women and children and only the former were shot. Surely, Indians wouldn’t have crossed over with their families, including children! However, Bose seems to be convinced that the soldiers thought the villagers were Indians who had crossed over.

Bose takes great pain to show that the killings by the West Pakistani soldiers do not amount to genocide as defined by the United Nations' Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide because they were not carried out with the aim of wiping out the Bengali race. Bose justifies this by explaining that on numerous occasions, men were segregated from women and children before being shot. In some cases, such as when a number of Hindu refugees fleeing to India were killed at a place called Chuknagar, the reason for killing was because the killers thought the Hindus would receive training in India and return to fight them.

With a few weeks after Operation Searchlight was launched on 25 March 1971, the Mukti Bahini were almost entirely crushed, though they continued to launch sporadic, but ineffective attacks which only succeeded in attracting reprisals. Indian forces therefore carried out frequent infiltrations into Bangladesh many months before the formal commencement of war in December 1971, using artillery, tanks and occasional air strikes to support the Mukti Bahini.

Why did the Bengalis start a movement for independence from their co-religionists just over two decades after fighting to break up India on the basis of religion? India was partitioned because elites among Indian Muslims felt that they would be marginalised in an independent India. In all probability Bengali elites started feeling marginalised by the Punjabi elite in the West and decided to have a country of their own. The Muslim Punjabi’s inability to understand the Bengali’s love for his language and culture doubtless played a role. Bengali hatred towards their countrymen from the west was focussed on the Punjabis, to the exclusion of other ethnic groups. Derogatory terms were used to describe Punjabis – such as Shala Punjabi (Punjabi bastards) or Punjabi Kukur (Punjabi dog) or Borbor (barbarian) or doshu (bandit) or noropisach (human demon) or noroposhu (human animal). Bose tells us that in comparison, West Pakistanis referred to the rebels as miscreants or Muktis or Awami League thugs. There were many instances of Pakistani soldiers helping Bengalis, but civilian accounts describe such soldiers as ‘Beluch’ or even Sindhi, though there were very few Baluchi soldiers in that theatre of war and in any event, the average Bengali civilian wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between a Punjabi and a Baluchi.

Bose ends the book on a dramatic, but thought provoking note. ‘When the Pakistani army came for Sheikh Mujib on the night of 25-26 March 1971, he was apprehensive; the soldiers arrested and imprisoned him, accusing him of treason. When the soldiers of the (Bangladesh) army came for Sheikh Mujib on 15 August 1975 he went to meet them as they were his own people; they killed him and all his extended family present, including his wife, two daughters-in-law, and three sons, the youngest a child of ten.

Ultimately, neither the numbers nor the labels matter. What matters is the nature of the conflict, which was fundamentally a complex and violent struggle for power among several different parties with a terrible human toll. The war of 1971 left a land of violence, with a legacy of intolerance of difference and a tendency to respond to political opposition with intimidation, brutalisation and extermination.’

I found this book, the main body of which runs to just 183 pages, with appendices and an elaborate and useful index taking up another 55 pages, difficult to read (though I read it over a single weekend) since the typeface is very small and cramped, making it strenuous for my eyes. The very matter of fact and clinical manner in which Bose discussed massacres and other atrocities did not make it any easier.

“Scrolls of Strife: The Endless History of the Nagas” by Homen Borgohain and Pradipta Borgohain

2011-12-16T05:08:00.008Z

Well known Assamese writer Homen Borgohain and his son Pradipta have come up with an excellent book on the Nagas, one of the most distinct ethnic groups within the Indian sub-continent. With a past that is shrouded in mystery and smoke from the fires of Naga insurgency yet to disappear completely, the proud Nagas have been misunderstood by mainstream India and its politicians. Scrolls of Strife makes a valiant attempt to reverse this position.

Naturally, the Naga quest for independence from India forms the crux of this book. The Borgohains try to examine this struggle from the Nagas’ point of view as well as from the other side. Since the Borgohains are not Naga, a fair amount of space is devoted to explain how the Nagas view them. Do they see them as Assamese or as fellow North-Easterners with a common Mongoloid heritage? Homen Borgohain is an Ahom (which makes his son Pradipta half-Ahom) and we are told that Homen finds easy acceptance in various parts of the north-east, especially in Manipur and Mizoram where he is mistaken for a local.

The Borgohains give various reasons why people from the mainland find it difficult to understand the Nagas or to accept them as one of their own. Food habits are an important reason. The Nagas, like the Mizos, are die-hard carnivores and eat anything and everything, including dog meat and bat meat. Their popular drink ‘Ju’ is form of rice beer, which attracts insects which lay eggs and spawn maggots and has to be drunk with the live maggots inside. The average Indian from the mainland with so many dietary restrictions would just not be able to share a meal with the average Naga. The Indian army has been present in Nagaland for many decades now and for many Nagas the Indian soldier epitomises India. However, the Borgohains are careful to point out that the Nagas have troubles not just with Indians from outside the northeast, but also with Assamese and the Manipuris.

The Nagas have a love-hate relationship with the Assamese since the region that is now Nagaland was once part of Assam and many of the bureaucrats who governed the Nagas were Assamese. The Borgohains narrate numerous examples of the animosity towards the Assamese – for example cars with Assamese number plates are much more likely to be vandalised in Nagaland. On the other hand, many centuries ago, the Nagas had learned to get along with the Ahoms who were almost as egalitarian as the Nagas. Since the various Naga tribes speak distinct languages that are mutually unintelligible to each other, a pidgin called Nagamese has evolved, which is largely based on Assamese. We are told the story of an Angami Naga who married an Ao girl. When asked what language he proposed to his future wife, the man replied, ‘Why, in Assamese, which is the language of love for all Nagas.’

After Nagaland was formed in 1963, many Nagas like the Tungkhul Nagas were left out of Nagaland, which has given rise to the demand for a greater Nagaland or Nagalim. The Borgohains tell us that until 1971 when Bangladesh was created, Pakistan did support the Naga insurgency from bases in East Pakistan, but doesn’t do so any more. The Chinese had an affair with Naga insurgents, but devout Christians and communists make strange bedfellows and after the Chinese failed to persuade the Nagas to link their insurgency with the Naxalites of West Bengal, they became disenchanted with the Nagas.

The Nagas fought the British but later grew to respect and even like them. During the British rule, American Baptist missionaries converted most Nagas to Christianity. Unlike mainland India where the people had organised religions which prevented conversions on a large scale, the Nagas’ animist faith did not stand up to missionary zeal. We are told that the Baptist missionaries had either the active or tacit support of the British government, but the reason for their overwhelming success was their dedication and single mindedness. Christianity tamed the Nagas who till then were head-hunters. However, it also unalterably changed the Naga character. Until Christianity was introduced to the Nagas, each Naga village was a sovereign state and each Naga home a castle. Christianity took away that village/clan/tribe based identity which the Nagas had.

Naga insurgents have tried to use Christianity to whip up support for their movement. ‘Nagaland for Christ’ is a catchy phrase, but do Christian missionaries actually support the Naga insurgency or the demand for independence? Apparently, there has been only one instance of a foreign missionary assisting Naga insurgents.

One of the best things about Scrolls of Strife are details of how various Indian leaders got along (or did not get along) with the Nagas. The Borgohains tell us that Mahatma Gandhi, Jai Prakash Narayan and Rajaji understood the Nagas and were very sympathetic towards the Naga cause. On the other hand, Jawaharlal Nehru was not, especially after the Nagas staged a walk-out in 1953 at a meeting in Kohima where the Burmese Prime Minister U Nu was also present. Indira Gandhi is supposed to have given the Nagas a patient hearing and they liked her. B. K Nehru did the opposite.

Just as interesting is the description of various Naga leaders like Zapu Phizo, T. Sakhrie, Thuengaling Muivah, J. B. Jasokie etc., their struggles and ideologies. The story of how T. Sakhrie took the path of peace and was beaten to death by Phizo’s men is as heartrending as the various tales of army brutality and discrimination faced by the Nagas in other parts of India.

These days many Nagas live and work in different parts of India where they sometimes feel discriminated against. The insurgency against India has been put on hold and the uneasy peace is likely to last for a while. Nevertheless, the Naga continue to be proud of their tribal identity, their culture, their (relatively new) Christian faith as they ponder their future in an ever changing world.

If there is one thing I didn’t like about this book, it’s that there are numerous references to the Battle of Khonoma where the Angami Nagas apparently put up a terrific fight against the British. However, the actual battle is not described and I could not even find it on the usually reliable Wikipedia. You can read about it on this blog though I can’t vouch for its veracity.

On the whole, this book is an excellent read and ought to be widely circulated within the Indian mainland – just so that fellow Indians know each other better.

When A Lawyer Falls In Love by Amrita Suresh – Book Review

2011-12-13T04:25:00.011Z

I picked up this book because I was under the impression that lawyers almost never fell in love, at least to my knowledge, and I wanted to read an account of a genuine, 24 carat lawyer falling in love. You know, I thought I would find out (how a hard-nosed lawyer could possibly fall in love) and pass on the information amongst my friends, many of whom, like me, are practising lawyers – my once in a lifetime contribution to my legal fraternity.

I was disappointed. Amrita Suresh’s book is about law students and not lawyers, which is not such a bad thing, but then, it could have been about art students or medical students or engineering students for all the difference it would have made. If one is looking for those nuggets of detail specific to law schools and those who study there, those tales of intense competition, rivalry and camaraderie, moot courts, idiosyncrasies of senior lawyers and such like, information which only lawyers and law students can generate, one would be disappointed. To be fair to Suresh, the novel’s back cover explains that Suresh isn’t a lawyer and the preface discloses that her knowledge of law schools has been gained through a close friend who went to a reputed law school.

Suresh writes well. The sort of smooth, feel-good writing one would associate with the Hardy Boys or the Famous Five or maybe even Nancy Drew. Most of the time, the writing is meant to convey the ache in somebody’s heart, like this one: ‘‘Ankur, I made this card for you,’ Sonali said handing him a neat light blue card. There was a cute sketch of a chubby little girl holding a flower and looking down. Sonali was exceptionally good at drawing. Just as she was exceptionally good at everything else. Like tormenting him.’ The dialogues usually play to stereotypes, like this: ‘A bulb is easy to fix,’ the young female engineer replied, ‘a male ego isn’t.’

The plot revolves around affairs of the heart, as the title would indicate or rather, affairs of multiple hearts and one is in little doubt as to the outcome even though Ankur Palekar is baby-faced and diminutive and the object of his affection, Sonali Shah does show short-lived partiality for the tall and handsome Rohit Randhwah. Almost all the leading characters come through the novel without any damage or injury. I wouldn’t say that Suresh has fleshed out her characters very well – they are rather two dimensional, but her descriptions do suffice for this tale. For example, while introducing the reader to Pavan Nair, the fall guy on many an occasion, we are told that: ‘Next to Souvik sat Pavan Nair, a guy, it was said, with a mind the size of a mighty star. When viewed from the earth that is. His painfully obvious observations made those around him want to develop homicidal tendencies.'

Sonali Shah believes in astrology and if the explanations of the zodiac and exceptional amount of dialogues revolving around star signs are anything to go by, author Suresh must take the stars very seriously.

We are told that AIU College is one of the most reputed law colleges in India and it is fully residential. However, there are no concerns about bad food in the hostel mess or the other usual discomforts one would associate with hostel life. There are students from all over India, as befits a law college that is so very reputed. There are Holi parties, college cultural festivals where smart, pretty, handsome law students meet smart, pretty, handsome engineering students and everyone has a good time. When the story kicks off, Ankur Palekar and friends are in their third year and when one reaches the last page of this 230-page ‘very light read’, they have graduated and are ready to step into the big bad world of lawyers. There are a few mentions of exams, with the characters worried more about their love affairs and one doesn’t really notice how the years roll by.

What I hated most about this book is that Suresh doesn’t tell us which city or town AIU College is located in. I know that this may not be a big deal for many, but for me, the inability to tie the story to a location ruined the tale. On top of that, there are a number of faux pas which are bound to be made when the author is a non-lawyer. For example, after telling us that AIU College is fully residential, even for those students who stayed a stone’s throw away, we find one student leaving college for personal reasons and hoping to complete ‘his final year through correspondence’. One hears a professor remind the students of a law firm which has achieved a certain certification, ‘so that they could start taking things seriously since they were in the final year’. I doubt if there is any law school in India where the teachers (have to) prod students into taking their search for a corporate law job seriously. Students are usually much more clued into corporate law firms than their teachers.

Now don’t let my peeves dissuade you from buying this book. It’s well written and if you like chik-lits, you might well enjoy When A Lawyer Falls In Love.

Revolution 2020 by Chetan Bhagat – Book Review

2011-12-12T05:03:00.003Z

Chetan Bhagat goes to GangaTech, a private engineering college in Varanasi to give a motivational lecture and meets its Director, the very young and very lonely Gopal Mishra. Gopal has an obvious drinking problem as well as an urge to tell his ‘story’, something which turns out to be very convenient, since Gopal’s story forms the rest of this novel. Since Gopal is lonely, it’s obvious that he didn’t ‘get’ the girl, the girl being the very pretty Aarti. However, Bhagat is such a good story teller that he keeps his reader on tenterhooks till the end of the book, open to a number of possibilities, wondering how exactly the story would reach the end already revealed at the beginning of the story.

Revolution 2020 has all the usual Bhagat ingredients. It has clichés, a half-decent plot which creaks just a little bit, parts of which could have come from a Harold Robbins or Jeffrey Archer novel, politically incorrect characters who shoot from the hip and could belong to any town in India, drama and a large dose of reality. I just can’t emphasise the last bit sufficiently enough. Clichés notwithstanding, Revolution 2020 takes the reader into the dark underbelly of India’s private education sector, where almost everything involves a bribe or something equally unsavoury. At times, I felt that Bhagat went overboard with this depiction of how bad things can be with private unaided colleges structured as trusts, which which are in reality full-fledged business enterprises. However, a friend did confirm that HR managers at certain large companies do ask for kick-backs from private colleges, ones that are at nowhere at the top of the rankings, to hire from those campuses.

Bhagat’s characters date, kiss, party and sleep around (furtively). Atleast some of them do so. Though this novel is set in small-town India, I did not find this to be unrealistic, given the genuineness of Bhagat’s narration and the changes that are sweeping across India's social landscape.

Bhagat’s language is not spectacular and I did notice at least one grammatical mistake, but on the whole, the English is good enough to convey the story. If you are not too snobbish to watch and enjoy a Bollywood movie, or any other Indian language movie for that matter, you could enjoy Revolution 2020.

A History Of The Sikhs, Vol II: 1839-2004 by Khushwant Singh – Book Review

2011-12-07T06:55:00.007Z

The second volume of Khushwant Singh’s A History Of The Sikhs picks up the story where it was left off at the end of the first volume – the death and funeral of Ranjit Singh. The sad notes continue. The regicides amongst Ranjit Singh’s seven sons which followed demise demonstrated how far the Sikh community and its rulers had moved away from the ideals preached by Guru Nanak. Power mattered and nothing else. Kharak Singh, Ranjit Singh’s eldest son and Kharak Singh’s son Nao Nihal Singh had to be cremated within hours of each other, their consorts performing sati. Ranjit Singh’s second son Sher Singh and his young son Pratap Singh were slain by Ajit Singh Sandhawalia and his uncle, the Sandhawalias being distant relatives within the royal family. The only gallant notes at that point in time come from the brave General Zorawar Singh who served the Dogras and led successful campaigns to Ladakh and Tibet. I had no idea till I read this book that Indian rulers had clashed with Royal Chinese troops in Tibet. And won most of their battles!

The Sikh army saw repeated mutinies, but performed excellently against the British during the first and second Anglo-Sikh wars. In fact, it performed so well during the Battle of Ferozeshahr during the first Anglo-Sikh war that the British Indian army took such a beating and ‘the fate of India trembled in the balance.’ However, the Sikh army had its share of traitors and Tej Singh who arrived with fresh troops and guns did not deliver the coup de grace. Instead, he silenced his guns and gave the British a reprieve. The next battle at Sabraon turned out to be India’s Waterloo, mainly on account of the role played by traitor Lal Singh. The Second Anglo-Sikh war also saw the Sikhs achieve a grand victory at Chillianwala, but they failed to follow up with decisive action.

After the British took over the Sikh Kingdom, a miracle took place. Enemies were converted into friends within a very short period, mainly on account of the excellent administration by the British backed by a sense of fair play. Canals were dug and deserts made to bloom. Wealth increased and the Sikhs became loyal foot soldiers of the empire. So much so that when India erupted in mutiny in 1857, the Sikhs were loyal to the Brits and practically saved the Empire. The opportunity of paying back the Mughals for the religious persecution they had suffered, especially the murder of Guru Tegh Bahadur by Emperor Aurangzeb, was only an added bonus. It was hardly surprising when after the mutiny the Sikhs were designated as a martial race and given special treatment while races such as the Bengalis who had helped the British defeat the Sikhs in the two Anglo-Sikh wars, were considered non-martial. Punjab became even more prosperous and loyal to the crown.

Another side effect of the British patronage of the Sikhs was that it prevented many Sikhs from reverting to Hinduism. Great care was taken to ensure that Sikh religious sentiments were not hurt, especially for those serving in the army. In fact, once enlisted, Sikhs could not cut their hair short or give up the outwards characteristics of Sikhism!

Most Indians would have heard of the Akalis and the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, but how many of us know how control of Gurudwaras used to be with Udasi mahants and the Akalis had to fight to gain control of their holy places? Do read this book to find out more. It’s worth it.

When the First World War erupted, the cream of Sikh youth went off to fight for the British in Gallipoli and Mesopotamia and various other fronts. The British were grateful, but also cautious since the Ghadr movement was also on. Migrant Sikhs shocked by the racist treatment they received in Canada and the USA, returned to Punjab to fight for its independence. The Punjabis were however not ready for an independence struggle and many of the Ghadr activists were turned over to the police.

One good thing about Khushwant Singh’s A History Of The Sikhs is the little snippets of information which are slipped in, which totally distort one’s understanding of a particular subject. For example, one gets to know that Kaiser’s Germany had plans to send large shipments of arms to support the Ghadr movement. However, the internecine quarrels between Indians dampened that enthusiasm. One Dr. Chandra Kant Chakravarty misappropriating a large amount of money provided by the Germans and sending them fictitious reports of his achievements dampened it even more.

During the Second World War, the Japanese initially treated defecting Indian soldiers poorly and with contempt. So much so that Captain Mohan Singh was forced to dissolve the INA. It was later revived when Subhas Chandra Bose arrived on the scene. By that time, the Allies had knocked the stuffing out of the Nipponese who had lost some of their swagger. However, the INA’s performance was poor on the whole, Khushwant Singh tells us.

Partition affected the Sikh community adversely, much more than the Hindus and Muslims in Punjab. The labour government partitioned Punjab on the basis of population and not property ownership. ‘The Radcliff award was as fair as it could be to the Muslims and the Hindus. The one community to which no boundary award could have done justice without doing injustice to others were the Sikhs. Their richest lands, over 150 historical shrines, and half their population were left on the Pakistan side on the dividing line.’

The best bit about the second volume is Khushwant Singh’s description of how the movement for Khalistan gained momentum and secessionism gained ground. The demand for a sovereign Sikh state had always existed. Some of those agitating for a Punjabi Suba from the time of India’s independence, which ultimately resulted in the creation of three states, Punjab, Haryana and Himchal Pradesh, did have an independent Sikh state in mind. However, it was the appeasement of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale by Indira Gandhi and her man in Punjab, India’s future President Giani Zail Singh, which fanned the flames of secessionism and led to Operation Blue Star and calamity. Khushwant Singh’s description of Operation Blue Star does not tally with the popular understanding of how Operation Blue Star unfolded. No, the Indian army did not rush into the Golden Temple without preparation and suffer huge casualties. Far from it, we are told that ‘many months earlier, the army had been instructed to keep itself in readiness to move to the Golden Temple whenever ordered to do so. A replica of the Temple complex had been prepared at Chakrata (near Mussoorie) to familiarize besiegers with its layout, entrances and fortified positions. Information of the strength of Bhindranwale’s fighters, their dispositions and the kind of weapons they possessed had been gathered by the intelligence agencies of the police and the army.’ I won’t divulge more except to say that when Sikh peasantry around Amritsar started to converge towards the Temple carrying whatever rustic weapons they could find, army commanders decided to finish off the task during the night of 5-6 June. ‘They threw in all they had: their commandos, frogmen, helicopters, armoured vehicles and tanks.’ Khushwant Singh tries to sound neutral and unconcerned, but his anger at the turn of events is evident. Do please read this book for a blow by blow account of how this attack unfolded and ended.

Khushwant Singh does not tell us about army casualties, though he does say that in the aftermath of the attack on the Golden Temple, around 4000 Sikh solders deserted their cantonments in various parts of India, slew their officers and fled towards Amritsar. Many were arrested. Some were killed. Just as riveting as the build-up to Operation Blue Star is the description of how Khalistani terrorism took deep roots in Punjab, till KPS Gill uprooted and destroyed it.

The only bit I didn’t like about A History Of The Sikhs is that Khushwant Singh’s description of the various battles fought by Sikh soldiers could have been better. The descriptions are detailed and good, but one misses the thunder of hoofs, the clash of steel, the euphoric scream of the victor or the knotty feeling of defeat in the tummy. I guess good history telling can do without all this and each of the two volumes of A History Of The Sikhs is excellent reading despite the lack of drama depicted from an infantry-man’s shoulder, the sort of stuff one finds in world-class history books such as Andrew Wheatcroft’s Enemy At The Gate which revolves around the Battle of Vienna (1682) where the Ottoman Turks were defeated at the gates of Vienna by a coalition of European powers. But still......

Khushwant Singh ends the book on a positive note commenting that in 2004, two Sikhs were at the helm of affairs in India, with Manmohan Singh holding fort as the Prime Minister and Montek Singh Ahluwali serving as the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, a notional fulfilment of the prophecy - Raj Karega Khalsa – the Khalsa shall rule.

Sonia Gandhi by Rani Singh

2011-11-29T03:59:00.004Z

Edvige Antonia Albina Maino has come a long way since her childhood in Italy. Given the pet name Sonia by her father who once spent time in time in Russia as a prisoner of war, Sonia Maino went to Cambridge to improve her language skills, met Rajiv Gandhi, scion of India’s most famous and longest lasting political dynasty (who had no political ambitions then), married him and lived happily ever after. Except that, things didn’t work out exactly like that and two political assassinations later, Sonia Gandhi is the President of the Congress Party which currently holds the reins of India’s federal government.

Biographer Rani Singh is a London based journalist who has worked with the BBC for many years. I picked up her biography of Sonia Gandhi in the hope that it would tell me something about the Lady-From-The-Land-Of-Mona-Lisa-With-An-Equally-Enigmatic--Smile which I didn’t know about. Disappointment settled in quite early. On page 3 itself, Rani Singh describes Rajiv as ‘North Indian, aristocratic and tall’. Born to a Parsi father and a Kashmiri Pandit mother, I’ve never heard Rajiv Gandhi described as a ‘North Indian.’ The Nehrus were very cosmopolitan, we are told by Rani Singh, though Indira Gandhi (who herself had married a Parsi) apparently had wanted a Kashmiri daughter-in-law for her son Rajiv.

This biography has evidently been written for a global audience, especially for people who have a vague idea of India and the Gandhi family and Sonia’s role in it and want to know more about all three. Nevertheless, I plodded along and was rewarded to some extent. There were a few trivia I hadn’t known about earlier. For example, I hadn’t known that Sonia’s father didn’t approve of her marriage and didn’t attend her wedding in India. I got to know a lot about Indira, Rajiv and Sonia’s food habits. Apparently one day, Sanjay Gandhi threw his plate across the room because the eggs Sonia Gandhi had cooked for him hadn’t turned out right. However, such gleanings are mere titbits and don’t really make this biography worth reading. Also, Rani Singh leaves some facts unexplained. We are told that Rahul Gandhi lived and worked in London for a while under the name Raul Vinci. Why did he do that? Was there a security threat to Rahul Gandhi in London? Even more intriguingly, we are told that Yaasser Arafat had warned Rajiv Gandhi of the threat to his life, just as Indira Gandhi had given a similar warning to Yaasser Arafat. How did Yaasser Arafat know of a threat to Rajiv Gandhi’s life? Let’s not forget that the LTTE which killed Rajiv Gandhi did have ties to the PLO at one point. No, Rani Singh tells us nothing more, in her book which at times seems to be largely a compilation of quotations from various sources.

Because this biography seeks to explain Sonia’s India to its readers, one gets a précis of the various political events that took place in India after Sonia’s arrival. Events such as the spat with Maneka Gandhi are also covered. However, this summary of events is, just like the rest of the biography, written in a one-sided manner which shows Sonia, Rajiv, their children Rahul and Priyanka and to a lesser extent Indira Gandhi in a very flattering light. For example, Indira Gandhi’s decision to declare emergency is described in the following manner: 'The morning of June 25 the threatened opposition protest packed the streets while Indira consulted a prominent lawyer and chief minister who was an expert on the Indian Constitution, telling him that drastic urgent action is required. The lawyer left to read and re-read the constitution and returned with his findings. Indira then asked him to escort her to see the President whom she informed that, as the Indian constitution provided grounds for action when a “grave emergency exists whereby the security of India is threatened by internal disturbances”, Indira and her government had decided to declare a State of Internal Emergency.’

There are certain notable omissions. There is no mention of Rajiv’s statement trivialising the anti-Sikhs riots that took place following his mother’s assassination. A few weeks after the assassination, Rajiv Gandhi is reported to have said, 'Some riots took place in the country following the murder of Indiraji. We know the people were very angry and for a few days it seemed that India had been shaken. But, when a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little.'

Rani Singh tells us that ‘Rajiv’s death was the most devastating of the three Sonia had experienced in the Nehru side of the family. Yet she now had to lead, to handle the proceedings and only managed it with the support of her equally devastated children.’ Yeah Rani Singh, I was under the impression that Sonia might have been devastated more by Indira Gandhi’s or possibly even Sanjay Gandhi’s death than Rajiv’s! Thanks Rani Singh for clarifying.

The funny thing about this biography is that it is not an authorised one and the author has not interviewed Sonia Gandhi for this book. One would expect an unauthorised biography to ask all the tough questions and poke into uncomfortable corners. Rani Singh does nothing of that sort. Using a consistently flattering note throughout the book, the reader is given a rose-tinted view of the Gandhi clan as a whole and the Rajiv-Sonia-Rahul-Priyanka sub-clan in particular. The ease with which political dynasties perpetuate in the sub-continent is explained and even justified, but is never questioned. The last one-third of the book seeks to explain why, after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, Sonia Gandhi entered politics after some initial reticence. According to Rani Singh, Sonia Gandhi was not happy at the way the Narasimha Rao government handled various issues, especially the Babri Masjid demolition. Also, many Congressmen keenly wanted a Gandhi at the helm. Therefore, Sonia Gandhi, who till then was working with a few NGOs which sought to further Rajiv Gandhi’s ideals and dreams, stepped into full-time politics. I can’t say I found this explanation fully convincing. After all, wasn’t it the same Sonia who so desperately tried to prevent Rajiv Gandhi from entering politics because she feared for his life? Now after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the same Sonia is keeping the chair warm for Rahul! Rani Singh tells us that ‘Sonia’s induction of Rahul into the mainstream of politics has been gentle. Though many critics are unhappy with the concept of dynastic leadership, it is a worldwide phenomenon and dynastic heirs are deeply conscious of the preservation of values as assets.’

Rani Singh doesn’t bother to analyse whether Sonia Gandhi is justified in controlling power from behind the scenes, taking decisions which the Prime Minister ought to be taking. Power without responsibility is not necessarily a great thing. An unfazed Rani Singh tells us that ‘Sonia’s project for India is grand social legislation and it’s driven by gut instinct more than calculation. For this purpose, she has created bodies entirely new to the Indian polity, made up of outspoken academics……………’

Before I end, tell me say that I do admire Sonia Gandhi for her dignity, grace and courage under fire. From what one sees and hears, she is as good a human being and politician as any in this country. There are faults of course, but then, who is without them? In any event, Sonia Gandhi deserves a better biographer than Rani Singh.

The Mad Tibetan – Stories From Then And Now by Deepti Naval

2011-11-22T04:33:00.003Z

Yes, in case you are wondering, it is the same Deepti Naval. Same as in, the actor (these days one doesn’t use the word actress) who has done over sixty movies. Naval has been published by Amaryllis, an imprint of Manjul Publishing, which will shortly bring out my novel When The Snow Melts. A few weeks ago, I had attended a book discussion event at the Crossword Book Store in Juhu where Deepti Naval discussed The Mad Tibetan – Stories From Then And Now with the even more famous actor Shabana Azmi and had picked up an autographed copy of the Mad Tibetan.

Yes, I knew that Naval has many talents, that she can paint, write and take pretty photographs, but reading is believing and until I finished the first of the eleven short stories that make up this collection, I didn’t really believe an actor could also write. Proof of the pudding is always in the eating, right?

The Mad Tibetan collection reminded me of a dandelion seed, with each story like those small seeds with white whiskers, which when you blow at them, float in the air for a few tantalising minutes, capturing a few fleeting, precious moments, before they are lost forever.

What I liked most about The Mad Tibetan collection was the way it dealt with relationships between men and women. There is mutual attraction, there is tension and some of the feelings are one-sided, but the man is not always on top. Bombay Central is the perfect example of this – Jatin is young and new to Bombay and when the man who befriends him on the train offers him a place for the night, one doesn’t suspect much. Even Jatin’s first impressions on meeting the wife do not arouse one’s suspicions as to what will follow. However, Premonition makes no bones about Vas’s attraction for the woman on the bus. She’s a bit older than him, but she has noticed him and seems to like him. Vas’s premonition of what’s going to happen stays in the background and distracts one from Vas’s pursuit of the woman, which is described so well and doesn’t have an iota of the usual note of harassment.

Tulli is a true story of how Naval made an expedition to a red light district in Mumbai to meet a real prostitute or two, before she played the role of a prostitute in a movie. It all goes off well, till Naval comes face to face with a dreaded pimp, one whom every woman in that brothel was scared of. The pimp is drunk and he mistakes Naval for a new girl in his keep. The two male friends who accompanied Naval are not at hand and Naval is in real trouble until Tulli, the madam she has been talking to, draws the pimp off Naval. Naval tells us that, ‘I stood at the door, unable to move, choked by the scenario before my eyes. The man, ferocious a while ago, was now crumbling in Thulli’s arms. I can never forget her face, the last that I saw of Thulli that night, as we looked at each other: one woman to another, our eyes glistening! I slowly turned towards the dark staircase, then looked back one last time, at Thulli’s world, stunned by the dichotomy…… the absurdity of equation in human bonds.’

Other than Tulli, at least two more of these tales are true stories from Naval’s life. Balraj Sahni shows a very young Naval all agog with admiration for the famous actor Balraj Sahni, desperate to get his autograph. Does she manage to do it? Please read this book to find out. D is an incident which could happen to any adult who runs into a school friend after a very long time. It could happen to me, it could happen to you, it could happen to anyone whose memory fails once in a while.

Is Birds also a true story from Naval’s personal dairy? Possibly. The narration is from the heart and the narrator’s pain is contagious. Between Balraj Sahni and Birds, one gets to experience hope and happiness, admiration and anger, sorrow, disgust, irritation and helplessness.

The acknowledgements page at the beginning of the book is enlightening as well as perplexing. So, Ruth Mayberry, the last story in the collection is an interpretation of the life of a dear friend. However, where exactly has Naval planted the bitter-sweet memory from a childhood in Himachal which her Naval’s friend Neeta Bakshi has shared with Naval? My money would be on Sisters, not just because it is set in Joginder Nagar, which I know is in Himachal Pradesh, but also because an aunt of mine once shared a bitter childhood memory with me. Once this aunt had returned home from boarding school for her summer vacations, her hair full of lice. My aunt’s aunt (who looked after my aunt since her parents lived overseas) had taken drastic measures and had her long tresses cut off immediately. Something similar happens in Sisters, but there’s a lot more to that story than the tonsuring of two lice-ridden heads.

The Mad Tibetan which has lent its name to this collection is a story of a …….well, a mad Tibetan whom Naval encountered in Leh. Naval tells us that the mad Tibetan is a bitter old man who is fierce and wild, but when he smiles, he is a child. Like many other stories, the ending is neither happy nor sad. The reader gets to meet the mad Tibetan firsthand and it’s time to move on. Period. The Piano Tuner, the first story in this collection, is also a similar vignette, this time of an old man in Bombay who once played the piano, but now reduced by Parkinson’s, tunes pianos with unsteady fingers. Most of the stories just end with the promise of a new and uncertain day. This is especially true of The Morning After where one finds Lily making a trip to Ghuggar to meet Dolma who seems to have a bad reputation in town. Dolma is dead, but lives on through her son Manu. Lily seems to be total stranger to Dolma and her household, but when she leaves Ghuggar, Manu goes with her and fittingly so. Do please read this wonderful book to find out why Manu should do so.

A History Of The Sikhs, Vol I: 1469-1839 by Khushwant Singh – Book Review

2011-11-16T05:57:00.011Z

Khushwant Singh’s A History Of The Sikhs has been on my reading list for many, many years. Recently I took the plunge and ordered both volumes. Auspiciously, Flipkart delivered them on the eve of Gurpurab. I had expected something on the lines of Khushwant Singh’s Delhi, one of my favourite books, but I turned out to be wrong. A History Of The Sikhs is written in very simple English, without any literary embellishments, as befits straightforward history telling. Very well researched, over one fourth of this four hundred page tome is taken up with appendices, a lengthy bibliography and a detailed index. In the main body of the book, footnotes take up a sizable part of each page.

Sikhism was born out of the conflict between Islam and Hinduism in late-medieval India, when there was a desperate need for a bridge between the two faiths. Nanak was a unique individual who, unusually for Indians of his time, was well-travelled and curious to know more and more. On the foundations laid by Guru Nanak, various Gurus developed the nascent faith through sacrifice and fortitude. Until I finished this book, I had no idea of the amount of bloodletting and massacres that accompanied the growth of Sikhism. Some of it reminded me of stories of the growth of Christianity and its martyrs and saints. The Mughals who followed Akbar started a policy of persecuting the Sikhs. After the murder of the fifth Guru Arjun Mal by Emperor Jehangir, his successor Gurus slowly turned the community towards the path of militancy. Starting with Guru Hargobind, Guru Har Rai, Guru Hari Krishen and Guru Tegh Bahadur, Sikh militancy and fortitude grew. It was Gobind Singh, the tenth Guru, who formally created the Khalsa and prescribed five emblems (Kes – unshort hair and beard, Kangha – comb in the hair to keep it tidy, Kach – knee length trousers. Kara – a steel bracelet, Kirpan – a short sabre) for each Sikh. Sikh resistance to persecution was now formal.

Before he was assassinated, Guru Gobind Singh charged a mystic named Lachman Das to continue the resistance against the Mughals. Renamed Banda, Lachman Das achieved great success and the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah had to order a general mobilisation of forces to counter Banda who outlived Bahadur Shah. However, Bahadur Shah’s successor Jahandar Shah wore Banda’s forces down and captured him. Torture and execution followed as was the norm for captured Sikh leaders.

The Sikhs and the Marathas contributed to the decline of the Mughals. After the Mughals became weak, the Great Persian ruler Nadir Shah invaded India, lured by its fabulous wealth. Nadir Shah’s invasion broke the back of Mughal rule in India. On his way back to Persia, Sikh bands plundered Nadir Shah’s baggage trains which were loaded with loot. The Sikhs liberated many Indian prisoners who were being taken to Persia by Nadir Shah. Nadir Shah was followed by the Afghan Ahmad Shah Durrani (also called Abdali) who invaded India nine times. Initially, Abdali’s main enemy was the Mughal ruler who for a brief period took assistance from the Sikhs in fighting Abdali. However, Abdali’s fifth invasion was meant to crush the Marathas who were helping the Mughals fight the Afghans. The Marathas were trounced by the Abdali’s Afghans in Panipat on 14 January 1761. The Sikhs stood by and watched. Muslims of northern India, the Rohillas and Shujauddaullah, the ruler of Oudh helped the Afghans. It was indeed a period of shifting loyalties.

After a while, the Sikhs became powerful and soon they were the most prominent power in the Punjab. Until the Sikhs became powerful, the tortures visited on Sikhs were abominable – entire villages burned and pillaged, mass public executions, usually at the horse market, victims, despatched from this earth with blows from wooden mallets, children of leaders like Banda hacked to death in front of their parents. The Harimandir at Amritsar was blown up so many times and the sacred pool filled with the entrails of slaughtered cows. Each time the indomitable Sikhs would clean up and renovate the Harimandir and the sacred pool. Abdali’s sixth invasion led to what the Sikhs call the Vadda Ghallughara, the great massacre, when in February 1962 a fleeing group of 30,000 Sikhs were attacked and most of them were killed. Within a few months of the massacre, the undaunted Sikhs had inflicted a defeat on the Afghan faujdar of Sirhind and by that autumn, they had cleaned up the Harimandir in time for Diwali. The Chhota Ghallughara or lesser massacre had taken place in June 1946 shortly before Abdali’s first invasion. The Sikhs had killed the brother of Lakhpat Rai, the Mughal Viceroy, in the course of fighting. In retaliation, around 7,000 Sikhs were rounded up and killed.

Khushwant Singh tells us that the story of the Sikhs is the story of Punjabi nationalism and consciousness and it is easy to see why it should be so. Other than the Sikhs who were all Punjabis, no other Punjabi community, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims, carried with them a Punjabi identity. Finally when Ranjit Singh created his empire, it was an inclusive one and Punjabis of all faiths were welcome in it. At the height of its power, the Sikh Kingdom under Ranjit Singh included Kashmir and Ladakh.

Even though the Sikhs fought to clear Punjab of all outsiders such as the Mughals and the Afghans, they never considered joining up with the Marathas to fight the British. During Ranjit Singh’s time, a Maratha – Sikh alliance did appear to be a faint possibility, but neither party was willing to take the first move. It is tantalising to imagine what could have happened if such an alliance had been worked out and used to fight the British. No, let me not digress and travel to a dream world – there was no such alliance. In fact, even when Ahmad Shah Abdali was fighting the Marathas during the Third Battle of Panipat, in which the Marathas were trounced, the Sikhs were only curious bystanders. The Sikhs even fought brief battles with the Gurkhas. Khushwant Singh does not bother to explain the obvious – that at that point in time, there was no concept of Indianness anywhere in the sub-continent.

I found Khushwant Singh’s descriptions of Ranjit Singh and his empire to be fascinating. The parallels between Ranjit Singh and Emperor Akbar are too obvious to be ignored. Akbar was an illiterate man who enjoyed beauty, music and literature. So did Ranjit Singh. Just as Akbar was of a short stature and non-descript appearance, Ranjit Singh too was not famous for his looks. Khushwant Singh describes him as a man of medium height, slight stature, spare frame, wiry as though made of whipcord, with dark-brown complexion, one eyed, his face pitted with small pox scars. To top it all, he had a long grey-beard. We are told that once Ranjit Singh’s Muslim wife Mohran asked him, ‘where were you when God was distributing good looks?’ When you were occupied with your looks, I was busy seeking power,’ answered the monarch.

If you wish to read a very good biography of Akbar, you could turn to Dirk Collier's The Emperor's Writings, which was published very recently.

Like Akbar, Ranjit Singh was also a superb horseman who usually spent 10 hours of the day in the saddle. Ranjit Singh too did not let matters of State prevent him from enjoying women, he had many wives. Unlike Akbar though, Ranjit Singh was a hypochondriac who was constantly on the lookout for cures and medicines. To know more about this fascinating ruler, please read this wonderful book.

Sikhism sought to be a faith which did not have many of the faults which Hinduism had. How far did the Sikhs succeed in this endeavour? A pointer to this would be the fact that after Ranjit Singh died, four of his wives committed sati. Khushwant Singh (quoting other sources such as the Lahore Akhbar) describes Ranjit Singh’s funeral thus: ‘Having arrived at the funeral pile made of sandalwood, the corpse was placed upon it. Rani Guddun sat down by its side and placed the head of the deceased on her lap; while the other ranis with seven slave girls seated themselves around, with every mark of satisfaction on their countenances. ......... The Brahmins performed their prayers from the Shaster ........the priests of the Sikhs did the same from their holy scripture called Granth Sahib and the Mussalmen accompanied them with their Ya Allah! Ya Allah! The prayers lasted nearly an hour. ........... At 10 o’Clockm nearly the time fixed by the Brahmins, Koonwa Khurruck Singh set fire to the pile and the ruler of the Punjab with four ranees and seven slave girls was reduced to ashes.’

I found this banal description incredibly saddening. Ranjit Singh was a great ruler and Sikhism was meant to be a simple religion without unnecessary rituals, still eleven women had to be killed on Ranjit Singh’s funeral pyre! I think I’ll need a lot of light reading before I tackle Volume 2.

Our Lady Of Alice Bhatti by Mohammed Hanif – Book Review

2011-11-10T03:47:00.009Z

Mohammed Hanif is a Karachi based journalist and writer who once trained to be an officer in the Pakistani Air Force. Hanif achieved fame through his debut novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Guardian First Book Award. It was also the Best First Book from Europe and South Asia for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

Hanif’s signature satire has not deserted him in Our Lady Of Alice Bhatti. Not only is it strong as ever, it is at times overwhelming, especially when mixed up with sarcasm, poverty, pain, violence and nastiness, the one human being to another type of nastiness. The story and plot of Our Lady is very simple. Body builder Teddy Bhatt meets pretty nurse Alice Bhatti, they get married on a submarine and then they don’t live happily ever after. Of course, it is not as simple as that. Teddy Bhatt the body builder also happens to be a police tout. Pretty nurse Alice Bhatti is a Choohra, slang for both Christians and sanitary workers in Pakistan, since a majority of sanitary workers in Pakistan seem to be Christians. At least, Alice Bhatti’s father is one.

A nurse who had her nursing education interrupted on account of a stint in the borstal, Alice is a fighter to the core, the type which fights with one’s nails and fists and if needed, a razor blade, rather than with guns or bombs. The borstal stint came about because Alice was literally left holding a cut vein with a pair of tweezers in an operating theatre when the surgeon had a coughing fit. Alice seems to have been at fault and the patient did die, but the reason Alice ended up in the borstal was more because she was, with some justification, accused of causing grievous bodily harm with intent to murder. We are not told if Alice actually wanted to murder the surgeon, but she did aim the marble flower pot at his head and break his nose and four front teeth. We are told that at her bail hearing in the sessions court, ‘Alice Bhatti carries her handcuffs lightly, as if she is wearing glass bangles. She treats the policewomen as if they were her personal bodyguards, and she looks at the judge as if to say, how can a man so fat, so ugly, wearing such a dandruff covered black-robe, sit in judgement on her?’

It’s not just Alice, all other characters in Our Lady of Alice Bhatti are equally unique, slightly eccentric and exceptional, but very much believable. Teddy Bhatt has a job which pays well, but he has irregular hours. A tout who hangs around with the Gentlemen's Squad or G Squad, Karachi Police’s version of Indian encounter specialists, Teddy’s job is to provide ‘valet parking for the angels of death’. When his boss, Inspector Malangi wants to kill someone, it’s Teddy who holds down the victim. When Malangi wants a thumb, Teddy’s provides one. His own. When a prisoner is taken on his final journey, it is Teddy who keeps him quiet and under control. ‘When all else failed, he would tell them cricket jokes, mostly about Imran Khan and his real bat, and they would laugh till their torture wounds would start bleeding and Teddy had to calm them down.’ The G Squad treats Teddy well. They arrange for Teddy’s wedding on the submarine and there’s a warm-up party at a safe house the night before the wedding where Teddy gets to go first with the girl hired for the night.

When Teddy goes to meet Alice and propose to her, he carries a Mauser with just three bullets in it.

Alice’s father Joseph Bhatti, in addition to being an expert on clearing clogged drains, cures stomach ulcers by reciting verses from the Holy Quran, a lit candle balanced on the patient’s tummy. Teddy’s father was a physical education instructor, a strict disciplinarian, a man who would make his wife take off her earrings every morning and give it to him to carry to his school and bring it back, just to make sure no one kills her for her earrings when he is away. Then there’s Noor, Senior Sister Hina Alvi (who is a Christian despite her Musla name), Dr. James Pereira and a few others, each of them as eccentric and interesting as the others.

French Colony where Alice grew up and from where she manages to escape after her marriage to Teddy is not the nicest place in Karachi. Descriptions of French Colony are scattered throughout the book. Here’s one of them:

‘Alice Bhatti walks past the shop owned by Jesus Bhatti, who sells cigarettes, milk and, when business is bad, pints of his own milk at the Sacred. Next to the shop is an empty shack from where the only entrepreneur in French Colony used to operate, stealing manhole covers and then selling them back to the Corporation. The open drain is clogged, its surface shimmering with all the plastic bags dumped in it. When Alice Bhatti was still a student, she used to mull over this question: if half the population of French Colony is responsible for clearing the garbage from the whole city, how come they can’t keep their own streets clean? Now she knows better and walks carefully trying to avoid the open sewers. She observes a gang of cats jumping the drain, playing a lazy game of catch.’

Even more than in A Case Of Exploding Mangoes, Hanif shines a spotlight on Pakistani society, the way it treats women, its Christian minority and anyone without influence and money. There are numerous anecdotes within Our Lady of Alice Bhatti which drive home this point. For example, when a young relative of a VIP patient whom Alice nurses, points a pistol to Alice's head and orders her to give him a blow job, Alice starts to comply and gets the flaccid member ready, but as soon as the blood vessels fill up and it elongates, she slashes it with a razor and calmly suggests that her tormentor go to "Accidents" for help. However, Alice has reason to be worried, because there is no formal complaint filed against her, which suggests that a private revenge is being planned. Senior Sister Hina Alvi helpfully suspends Alice for two weeks, with full pay mind you, in the hope that it would mollify the man and his relatives.

Hanif writes well, extremely well. When Teddy messes up and a prisoner escapes from his control, Inspector Malangi does not scream at him. Instead, he takes him out for breakfast and insists that Teddy eat and eat well and eat some more. The reader actually feels Teddy’s anxiety as he shoves the omelettes, toast and tea down into a quivering tummy. Towards the end, I was rooting for Teddy and Alice though I knew that they were both doomed. When the end comes, it is tragic and doesn’t really make much sense, but then, human behaviour does not always make sense, does it? The plot starts unravelling only from the middle of the 230-odd page book and events move rather fast after that. There were times when I found the sarcasm a mite too much and the darkness too depressing. Nevertheless, Our Lady Of Alice Bhatti is a good read, as good as A Case Of Exploding Mangoes.

A Taste of Kerala – Stories From Simhapara

2011-11-07T09:07:00.002Z

A few years ago, on a lark, I wrote a collection of ten short stories set in Simhapara, a fictional village in Kerala. Published on Epic India Magazine and later on Winnowed, I thought it would be a good idea to have the links to these stories in one place. Here they are:

1. The Boy Who Killed A Rainbow

2. Hundred Rupees

3. A New Beginning

4. A Difficult Decision

5. A Pristine Landscape

6. New Kid On The Block

7. Bad Hair Day

8. The Hidden Smile

9. The Family Heirloom

10. A Suitable Father

Steve Inskeep’s “Instant City: Life And Death In Karachi” – Book Review

2011-11-04T09:11:00.008Z

Recently a friend pointed me to a Wikipedia page which showed Karachi to be more populous that Mumbai. According to this wiki page, Karachi has a population of 12,991,000 people whilst Mumbai has only 12,478,447. That got me interested in knowing more about Karachi and few clicks of the mouse and a week later, Flipkart delivered Steve Inskeep’s Instant City into my hands. I now realise that the list I had found on Wikipedia does not take into account surrounding suburban areas. As Inskeep himself explains at the end of Instant City, ‘cities are usually discussed in terms of their metropolitan areas – the central city plus suburbs and other outlying areas linked by commuting’. By this yardstick, Karachi had a population of 13.1 million in 2010, while Delhi had 22.1 million and Mumbai had 20 million.

On 28 December 2009, a bomb blast hit a Shia Ashura procession in Karachi killing scores of people. Inskeep’s story about Karachi, strictly non-fiction mind you, revolves around this blast. Who could have caused it? ‘What really happened on 28 December 2009?’ Inskeep wonders and explores various possibilities. Instant City’s blurb goes to the extent of stating that it is ‘the story of a single day in Karachi’s life.’ This isn’t exactly true because Inskeep’s excursion into Karachi is a free-flowing jaunt not restricted to the bombing of the Ashura procession on 28th December 2009. Nevertheless, for a big part of the book, the blast plays a central role.

Inskeep’s writing style reminded me of Dominique Lapierre’s and Larry Collins’s various masterpieces like O Jerusalem, Freedom at Midnight and Is Paris Burning? Instant City is a similar masterpiece, though at 250 odd easy-moving pages, it is not as voluminous and some of its descriptions do not have the depth of a Lapierre/Collins book.

By the time one reaches the middle of Instant City, it becomes obvious that Inskeep in unlikely to lead his readers to a grand ending where the identity of those behind the Ashura bomb blast is revealed. Instead, Instant City gets more and more interested in matters such as growth and decline of cities in general and Karachi’s metamorphosis in particular. Towards the fag end of the book, after visiting a locality in Korangi where the street level has risen steadily on account of clogged drains and encroachments, we hear Inskeep say, ‘On that street I finally understood what happened to those ancient cities I had seen; this must have been roughly the way Babylon went underground, and the way that cities were layered on top of cities at Sirkap. Great empires and grand dreams were buried by simple entropy. Bad drainage. Failure to clean the sewers. Failure to pick up the garbage. Failure to look after the neighbors [sic]. Failure to respect the greater good. Failure to govern. Failure, in short, to find workable solutions to chronic problems.’

However, Karachi wasn’t always destined to be a city with so many problems. After Pakistan was formed, Karachi became its capital. President Ayub Khan had grand plans for Karachi. Soon after the military coup which brought him to power, he picked up a shovel and laid the foundation stone for Karachi’s first suburb. Constantinos Doxiadis, a highly reputed planner, was put in charge of the construction project at Karachi. It was a difficult job since Karachi was not a clean slate and Karachi was flooded with refugees who had fled independent India. An undaunted Doxiadis tried to ‘create communities where poor people could thrive. He planned buildings that would function efficiently in Karachi’s intense heat. Schools would take advantage of traditional South Asian methods of climate control. They would have perforated concrete walls to increase air flow, as well as wind catchers on the roofs...... He left spaces for gardens in front of and behind houses...... He opposed importing Western construction practices.’

However, Doxiadis’s dreams and plans didn’t really work out for Karachi. The poor moved into every nook and cranny they could find. They had to look after themselves, since it was obvious that the powers-that-be didn’t care for them. Ayub Khan himself started to feel that Karachi had too many problems and moved the capital to Islamabad, which was also designed by Doxiadis. To know more about how Doxiadis’s plans went awry, do please read this brilliant book which tells Karachi’s story from the time of Jinnah till the present.

Within the fabric of Karachi’s story, there are a number of smaller stories woven in. For me, the best was that of Abdul Sattar Edhi, the founder of the Edhi Foundation, the leading charity in Pakistan. The Edhi Foundation runs a fleet of ambulances which race to every accident or bomb blast site. It also runs homes for the destitute, animal shelters, public kitchens and rehabilitation centres for drug addicts. Abdul Sattar Edhi is a Mohajir, an immigrant to Karachi who started with very little and even now has very little – he still lives with his in a single room. In light of all this, one would think Abdul Sattar Edhi is as close to a saint as one can get. But hold on, Inskeep shows his readers the various facets of Mr. Edhi which makes one pause a bit, especially the admission by Mr. Edhi himself that he is ‘mentally disturbed person’ and the information that Mr. Edhi takes medicines such as Tegral 200 which is used to treat, inter alia, manic depressive psychosis. The best part is the diatribe from his wife Bilquis Edhi who tells Inskeep what a lousy husband she has got. Did you know that Mr. Edhi had, after a decade of marriage to Bilquis, taken in a second wife who eventually left him? Inskeep (rightly in my opinion) tells us that Mr. Edhi, 85 years old at the time of Instant City’s release, is ambitious, though his ambition ‘involved no outward sign of material success’. The insight into Mr. Edhi is yet another reason to read this wonderful book.

I have always been fascinated by the Muttahida Quami Mahaz, once called the Mohajir Quami Movement, MQM for short, a party which seeks to represent immigrants from India and Bangladesh. In Pakistan: A Hard Country, Anatol Lieven talks of the MQM in tones of awe, as he explains how the MQM has built itself into the most powerful group in Karachi, amidst so many animosity and hatred towards the Mohajirs. Inskeep does not share Lieven’s sense of admiration for the MQM, though he concedes that MQM has managed to unify the immigrants who did not have much in common and created an ethnic group out of thin air. Instead, Inskeep devotes more space towards the excesses of the MQM as it seeks to keeps out other immigrants from Karachi and battles the almost equally secular Awami National Party, founded by the Frontier Gandhi and which represents Pathan interests in Karachi. Mustafa Kamal, the Mayor of Karachi, an MQM party man who rose up from humble beginnings, represents the ruthlessness as well as the efficiency of the MQM, a party which recognises merit and allows individuals without patrons to rise up from the ranks. Mustafa Kamal battles to modernise Karachi and make it an IT hub, but one fine day, the post of Mayor is abolished in all Pakistani cities and the good fight comes to an end.

Inskeep’s tome has space for a host of other characters who are no less interesting that Edhi. There’s Ardeshir Cowasjee, the son of the most famous shipping magnate in Karachi, who even now writes columns in the Dawn, fighting the degradation of the city he was born in. You get to meet Sharfuddin “Bobby” Memon, the owner of Lighthouse Cinema and the Head of the Citizen’s Police Liaison Committee. In a blast from the one, you get to know of K. Punniah, editor of Sindh Observer, who returned to Bangalore shortly after the Partition, unable to accept a Karachi which turned its back on its Hindu inhabitants, and died of a heart attack. Tony Tufail, peddler of dreams, built a casino using know-how imported from Macao, but it never got the final licence to take off, thanks to Zulfikar Bhutto’s compromises with Islamic fundamentalists and his ultimate overthrow by Zia-ul-Haq. And there are numerous committed private individuals like Adnan Asdar, Dr. Seemin Jamali, the Incharge of Emergency Department at JPMC Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre and Perween Rahman, the director of the Orangi Pilot Project-Research and Training Institute, who keep Karachi afloat amidst so much hopelessness.

Inskeep’s concluding chapter is for all practical purposes a Sermon on the Mount for the denizens of Karachi. ‘Karachi’s diversity is an asset in a world that is fractured along religious lines. If, for example, Karachi’s Christians and Hindus were fully and openly welcomed into public and commercial life, they would effectively become ambassadors for Pakistan. They could explain the country to its detractors, providing a bridge to non-Muslims in India and the West. If religious minorities could say convincingly that they lived in freedom and security, they would compel the world to think differently of Pakistan.’ A big (non-alcoholic) toast to that prayer from Inskeep. Ameen!

Book Review: "Across the LoC – Inside Pakistan Administered Jammu and Kashmir" by Luv Puri

2011-10-31T14:48:00.006Z

Luv Puri is a reputed journalist who has in the past worked for the Hindu and reported extensively on Pakistan and the conflict in Jammu and Kashmir. Currently a Fulbright scholar at the New York University, Puri has written a book which, like Puri’s first name, is compact and petite (though not as sweet) and seeks to ‘go beyond the official narrative and present an objective view of the situation on the ground in Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan Administered Jammu and Kashmir in particular and reconcile the contesting views of India and Pakistan’.

Puri succeeds to a large extent. The facts and statistics presented in Across the Loc are of the sort one doesn’t come across easily in the mainstream media. A fair amount of attention is paid to the demographics of J&K prior to 1947. Jammu and Kashmir were so different in many ways, not just in the percentage of Muslims in each region. We all know of Sheikh Abdullah and the National Conference. How many of us know of the Muslim Conference and its relationship with the Muslim League in undivided India? Do you know how well Jinnah got along with Sheikh Abdullah especially after Jinnah’s visit to the state in 1944? In simple terms, the National Conference was pro-India and pro-Congress and the Muslim Conference was pro-Pakistan and pro-Muslim League. However, the Muslim Conference’s leadership in Jammu did not see eye to eye with its leadership in the Valley. So much so that the President of the Jammu group announced at a press conference on 28 May 1947 that it stood for independence. Less than two months later, Mirwaiz Yusuf Shah, the leader of the Muslim Conference in Srinagar sought internal autonomy and accession to Pakistan in matters relating to defence, foreign policy and communications.

Puri’s account is very objective and balanced. He refers to India-held Kashmir as Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir or IAJK and Pak-held Kashmir is Pakistan administered Jammu and Kashmir or PAJK. The book is divided into six chapters and each of those chapters told me a lot of things I didn’t know earlier. For example, Puri tells us that after India recaptured lost territory during the 1965 War, retaliatory action was unleashed against the Muslims in the Mendhar area of Poonch district, suspected to have sided with Pakistan’s campaign. Apparently this led to large-scale displacement from IAJK to PAJK. The chapter on Mirpur and the role played by immigrants (to the UK) from Mirpur in the JKLF and other insurgent groups is very interesting. It is claimed that half the Pakistani immigrants in the UK are from Mirpur. Equally interesting is Pakistan’s attempt to show PAJK or Azad Kashmir to be an independent country, which is subject to an international dispute, and give it the trappings of a sovereign state with its own Supreme Court, President and Prime Minister, even though the Legislature of PAJK has to share power with the Azad Jammu and Kashmir Council.

Where Puri fails to deliver is in the analysis department. Across the LoC is solid on fact, no doubt about it. However, the presented facts are not analysed and opinions put forth to the extent one would expect in a book of this nature. Much of the text consists of quotes from other books or from people interviewed by the author. Puri rarely puts forth a point of view and this can be immensely irritating. For example, when Puri talks of Darul Uloom, Asia’s largest Muslim seminary at Deoband in Uttar Pradesh, he says that ‘till the 1980s, 25 per cent of the students at the seminary came from outside India.’ Apparently, the Indian government has now cut down the number of student visas given to international students and their numbers have dropped. Puri says that ‘many scholars at Deoband feel that a liberal visa policy will contribute to infusing the true Deobandi pedagogy in its true spirit that is neither incendiary nor extremist.’ Okay, so far so good, but does Puri think that a more liberal visa regime would make sense? You never get to know since Puri does not spell out his stand.

Despite this shortcoming, Across the LoC is an excellent (or even mandatory) read for anyone interested in the Kashmir dispute.

Land of Two Rivers by Nitish Sengupta – Book Review

2011-10-24T05:34:00.005+01:00

Nitish Sengupta studied history at the Presidency College, Kolakata, taught history for a brief while and then, like so many talented Indians of his generation, joined the Indian Administrative Services. After his retirement, Sengupta entered politics and joined the Trinamool Congress, ending up in the 13th Lok Sabha (1999-2004). Currently Sengupta is Chairman of the Board for Reconstruction for Central Public Sector Enterprises in New Delhi. Despite all this, Sengupta never lost his love for history, as evidenced in his most recent book, Land of Two Rivers, a project which took him seventeen years to complete.

A labour of love, Sengupta wrote Land of Two Rivers in the hope that it will encourage ‘those who speak Bengali, about 250 million in number, take an active interest in their common political history, their shared composite culture and above all, the common language they take pride in.’ Note the words ‘common’ and ‘composite’, the former used more than once in the sentence I have just quoted. These words and their synonyms are used repeatedly by Sengupta as he describes the ethnic origins of the Bengalee race and takes his readers from the time human habitation came to the land where the Ganga and the Brahmaputra flow, till the creation of Bangladesh. How did the various ethnic groups in the land of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra fuse together to become Bengalees? How was the Bengali language, the sixth largest in the world in terms of number of people speaking it, formed in the tenth century? Why did the Suhrawardy-Sarat Bose attempt to have an ‘independent, sovereign, undivided Bengal in a divided India’, fail? One detects a tinge of regret as Sengupta describes the second partition of Bengal and chest thumping pride as Sengupta talks of how Bengalis in East Pakistan fought for their language. And won.

Let me repeat this. Sengupta took seventeen years to write this book and every paragraph in Land of Two Rivers reflects the effort that has been put in. There are no dramatisations, other than that which occur on their own, and Sengupta’s descriptions are very much matter of fact, be it his description of how the Chinese Buddhist traveller, Fa-Hien’s writings mention a prosperous Bengal or the description of the events of Direct Action Day on 16 August 1946 and the Calcutta Killings. Sengupta evidently subscribes to the school of historial thought propagated by RC Majumdar and later Romila Thapar. The Aryan migration theory is accepted and is used to partly explain migrations into the areas which is now form West Bengal and Bangladesh as well as caste structures and ethnic mixing amongst Bengali speakers.

Sengupta’s inflection-less writing comes at a price though. There were times when, while going through a description of, say, the Kaibarta rebellion in the 11th century, I had to stop in mid-sentence and figure out who ‘Bhim’ was. Since Land of Two Rivers is a continuous flow of facts and characters at an even pace without flourishes or melodrama, many names and facts merely flowed through my head without lodging. I had to scan through two of the preceding paragraphs twice before I could locate ‘Bhim’, the third of the three Kaibarta chiefs who occupied Varendra or north Bengal.

Sengupta does not hesitate to fight for his (Bengalee) heroes. When discussing Sasanka, the first ruler of the land that later came to be called Bengal, and his alleged anti-Buddhist bias, Sengupta pleads that ‘in fairness to Sasanka, it needs to be emphasized that his so-called anti-Buddhist stance was clearly more political than religious. He had to fight against two Buddhist kings and therefore, some Buddhists in his own dominion had to bear the brunt of his hostility. But he should not be made to suffer in the eyes of posterity for not having had emotionally motivated chroniclers like Banabhatta and Hiuen-Tsang to write in his favour.’

Sengupta carries out a similar exercise in the case of Siraj-ud-Daula and the Battle of Plassey, which, Sengupta tells us, was not exactly a whitewash as many historians have made it out to be. Sengupta’s description of the young Siraj-ud-Daula who was so talented and had so many short-comings is one of the best bits of this book. Did the Black Hole of Calcutta actually exist? Do please read this book to find out what Sengupta has to say about it. Equally well written is the chapter on Subhas Chandra Bose. Aptly titled the 'Rise and Fall of Netaji Bose', this brief and succinct chapter told me more about Netaji than any other book I have read. However, Sengupta does not ask or answer one crucial question: Was Subhas Chandra Bose right in having started the INA rebellion? With the benefit of hindsight, it seems obvious that the Japanese and Germans were bound to lose the war, but in the dark days of the German Blitzkrieg, Pearl Harbour and the British retreat from Singapore, who knew which power would prevail? Subhas Bose wanted independence for India at any cost and was willing to ally himself with the devil, for all he cared, as long as he achieved his goal.

One important Bengalee politician whose character I felt could have been analysed in greater detail, is Suhrawardy. A man who played almost as important a role as Jinnah in the creation of Pakistan and the popularisation of the Muslim League among ordinary Muslims, Suhrawardy was almost entirely responsible for the Calcutta killings during Direct Action Day. However, Suhrawardy also took the lead in fighting for Bengalee rights after Partition and joined the Awami Muslim League, later renamed as the Awami League. Sengupta does talk of Suhrawardy in detail, but analysis of his character on the lines of Subhash Chandra Bose or Siraj-ud-Daula is missing.

Unfortunately and sadly, Sengupta’s tome slows down after Bangladeshi independence, through there are brief mentions of developments till the West Bengal elections of 2006 when the CPI(M) was returned to power, despite inroads made by the Trinamool Congress. I do wish Sengupta had discussed and analysed the agitation for Gorkhaland by Nepali speakers in Darjeeling and Doars in the north of West Bengal. The absence of discussion on this topic is all the more glaring because towards the end of the book, Sengupta devotes a page to ‘Bengalees in India outside West Bengal’ and dwells upon the plight of Bengalees in the Barak valley of Assam. In a country where all states have been divided on a linguistic basis and where every linguistic group has a state of its own, should the Bengalees who care so much for their language and who suffered so much at the hands of those who sought to impose another language on them, prevent Nepali speaking Gorkhas from having a state of their own?

I was also hoping that Sengupta would make an attempt to analyse why Indo-Bangladeshi relations are not so warm or friendly as they ought to be, considering India's assistance in the creation of Bangladesh, a topic on which, I am sure Sengupta could have contributed a lot. After the creation of Bangladesh, a large number of Urdu speakers in Bangladesh, many of whom had colluded with the Pakistani army, were disenfranchised. I wish Sengupta had expressed his views on this issue.

Nevertheless, despite the few ‘missing’ issues and events, for all history buffs, friends of Bengal, lovers of Bengali and Bengalees, Land of Two Rivers will undoubtedly make a riveting read.

Note: Sengupta spells the language as ‘Bengali’ and the people of Bengal as ‘Bengalee’.

Muammar Gaddafi and Velupillai Prabhakaran – Parallels in Life and Death

2011-10-22T09:18:00.002+01:00

Gaddafi recent demise at the hands of TNC fighters reminded me of Prabhakaran’s death at the hands of Sri Lankan forces in May 2009.

Both leaders were very charismatic, essentially secular, with patches of left-wing socialism and aspirations to be modern and high-tech. Both leaders built up a personality cult around themselves. Neither leader hesitated to invoke God or religion or play on the religious sentiments of the people or play one religious group or sect against others. For example, in 1990, Prabhakaran’s LTTE expelled over seventy thousand Tamil speaking Muslims from their homelands in the Northern Province, towns such as Chavakacheri, Kilinochchi, Mannar and Jaffna, since they were suspected to the traitors to the cause of Tamil Eelam. In Jaffna, the entire Muslim population was forced to assemble in the grounds of Osmania college and leave within 2 hours, carrying with them nothing more than the clothes on their backs and fifty rupees each in cash.

Both leaders were happy to build links with other terrorist groups world-wide. If Gaddafi provided semtex to the IRA, Prabhakaran’s LTTE had links with various terrorist and naxalite groups in India to whom they sold weapons. The LTTE also used its shipping and logistics units to transport drugs from Colombian cartels and sold them to raise revenue. The LTTE had ties to the IRA as well and Sinn Fein arranged for Prabhakaran’s son Charles Anthony to study Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Belfast. One of Gaddafi’s sons, Saif al-Islam, went to the London School of Economics, where he completed a Ph.D. It was later alleged that Saif al-Islam’s Ph.D thesis on "The Role of Civil Society in the Democratisation of Global Governance Institutions" was plagiarised.

Both leaders always had a working relationship with the West. Despite sanctions and other restrictions, Libyan officials were always in contact with European countries which were keen to do business with the oil rich state. As for the LTTE, even after sanctions were imposed by many Western states, the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora made it easy for them to cultivate mid-level leaders in the West who were keen to remain in the good books of the Diaspora, many of whom could vote in the elections.

Death came to both Prabhakaran and Gaddafi in a violent manner, at the hands of men who were just as violent as they were. Gaddafi was captured alive as he tried to flee the TNC’s stranglehold over Sirte. After being beaten and manhandled, he was most probably executed by fighters who did not have the patience to put him on trial as international law would demand. In his final days, Prabhakaran too had been holed up with a few close aides at Mullaivaikaal near the Nanthikadal lagoon in Mullaitivu, North Eastern Sri Lanka. He tried to break out of the military dragnet around him and almost made it. It is alleged that he was captured alive and later killed by the Sri Lankan army, which like the TNC fighters in Sirte, had run out of patience for the demands of International law and human rights, though the Sri Lankan government claims that he died of a random gunshot wound and that his body was accidentally discovered.

Prabhakaran’s wife Mathivathani Erambu, daughter Duwaraka and second son Balachandran were also found dead within a short distance of Prabhakaran’s body, giving rise to the credible suspicion that all of them were killed by the Sri Lankan army. Prabhakaran’s eldest son Charles Anthony was killed a day earlier. One of Gaddafi’s sons Motassim Gaddafi was killed along with him, most probably in the same manner, after being captured alive. There are conflicting reports that some of Gaddafi’s other many sons, like Khamis Gaddafi, Saif al-Arab and Saif al-Islam have also been killed or captured.

The Scorpion's Tail by Zahid Hussain – Book Review

2011-10-19T04:54:00.004+01:00

Zahid Hussain is a Pakistan based journalist and correspondent who has worked for the Wall Street Journal, The Times of London and Newsweek. His book The Scorpion's Tail was released almost a year ago, but I got around to reading it only now.

Minus its notes and index, The Scorpion's Tail runs to just over 200 pages and is an easy read because a large chunk of it is written in the style of reportage. Hussain traces the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan from the time of its creation when clerics of the Deobandi sect opposed India’s partition because they felt it would weaken Muslim power in the Indian subcontinent. Though Hussain is short on analysis, The Scorpion’s Tail is an excellent description of the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan. One gets a ring-side view of events as they unfolded and as Pakistan moved away from democracy towards dictatorship and gave Islamic fundamentalists a greater say in public affairs.

Hussain’s sources are mainly news reports from the BBC, CNN and similar news vendors. He has also relied on his own interviews with various people, such as friends of Benazir Bhutto. Hussain commences his books thus: ‘On a hot August night in the remote town of Makin in Pakistan’s South Waziristan tribal region, a short and stocky bearded man, hooked up to an intravenous drip, lay on a cot on the rooftop of a vast house. A young woman in her late teens massaged his legs. Nearby a predator drone hovered in the clear sky, then zoomed in on the couple………’

While describing the attack on the Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi on 10 October 2009, Hussain tells us that ‘the men in crisp white fatigues riding a white Suzuki van with a military registration plate evoked no suspicion. The guards at the first security checkpoint waved them through………….As the van made its way past the checkpoint, gunmen suddenly jumped out and started firing indiscriminately………the gunmen ran towards the heavy iron gates. Apparently out of nowhere appeared another group of gunmen in uniform, and before the guards could realise what was happening several of them were shot. An intense firefight broke out when the soldiers in the watchtowers began firing on the intruders, killing three of them and injuring another. Gunmen coming up just behind the injured attacker then shot their wounded colleague dead in an attempt to confuse the guards. The trick worked: the guards made no attempt to stop the attackers as they rushed towards…….Brig. Anwar ul-Haq, the director of security, was in a conference in his office in the building when the melee broke out. Interrupting the meeting and rushing into the hallway, he saw a man in military uniform with his back turned to him and called out, “Move away from here.” The man turned around and shot him dead.’

How did Hussain know what exactly Brig. Anwar ul-Haq said to the gunman before he was shot dead? Hussain does not reveal his source. No, I am not disputing Hussain’s version since various newsreports, such as this New York Times report, have said something very similar.

While describing the 4 December 2009 terrorist attack on a mosque in Rawalpindi frequented by military officers which killed 36 people, Hussain does not tell us if the mosque was Shia or Sunni. The name Askari suggests Shia, but then I am no expert on these matters.

What I didn’t like about The Scorpion’s Tail is that Hussain avoids expressing his own view even when the circumstances beg him to do so. For example, Hussain tells us that after Benazir Bhutto was killed ‘Zardari produced Benazir’s will which declared that he should lead the party in the event she was killed. Many of her friends and associates believed that the will was fabricated, but given the turmoil in the party due to her death, he faced little opposition in the party ranks.’ A footnote tells us that Hussain bases this report ‘on author interviews with close friends and aides to Benazir Bhutto.’ However, what’s Hussain’s view? Does he feel the will produced by Zardari was fabricated? We never know.

Hussain’s conclusions are very simple. According to Hussain, there is a fundamental flaw in the U.S approach to the war, namely a failure to appreciate that the Taliban are essentially Pashtuns fighting to evict outsiders in their historical homelands, just as they fought the Red Army and other earlier invaders. Hussain feels that this war is unwinnable for the US and feels that a political settlement is the only solution. Hussain makes a few references to India’s attempts to gain a foothold in Afghanistan and hints that Pakistan’s ISI is justified in supporting the Taliban in an effort to counter Indian influence over non-Pashtu ethnic groups in Afghanistan, especially northern Afghanistan. In short (though he doesn’t spell it out), Hussain wants the Pashtu dominated Taliban to be given control over Afghanistan, at least the Pashtu majority areas, and hopes that such a settlement will put an end to the terrorist attacks in Pakistan.

As Aryn Baker, Time's bureau chief for Pakistan and Afghanistan has written in this article, it is clear that the US troops in Afghanistan are fighting a losing battle and it is only a matter of time before they leave Afghanistan. Once they do, the Taliban are bound to defeat the rag-tag Afghan National Army and re-establish the control they had prior to 9/11. A few Tajik and Uzbek warlords may control a few slices of territory in the north. However, will that put an end to fighting in Pakistan? What’s the guarantee that the Pakistani Taliban will not continue the fight in Pakistan for a greater say in government? Wouldn’t the Al Qaeda like the idea of controlling a state which has nuclear weapons? With a safe haven in Afghanistan, wouldn’t Islamic fundamentalists want to continue the good fight which started out as revenge attacks in retaliation for Pakistani support for the US forces and the drone campaign? It is very unlikely that Islamic fundamentalists will manage to take over Pakistan. Most Pakistanis are happy to use the militants to fight in Kashmir and elsewhere, but as explained by Anatol Lieven in his brilliant book Pakistan: A Hard Country, Pakistanis do not want mullahs to rule Pakistan. The Pakistani army carried out a successful campaign against the Taliban in Swat and (to a lesser extent) in South Waziristan. If needed, the Pakistani army has the ability and determination to fight the Taliban if they attempt to takeover Pakistan. However, none of this precludes the Taliban from making a bloody and very expensive (for everybody) attempt to do so.

India’s External Intelligence – Secrets of Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) by Maj Gen VK Singh – Book Review

2011-10-17T00:57:00.006+01:00

I bought this book (which was published in 2007) because I have always been curious about RAW, India’s external intelligence agency, about which not much is known, at least not as much as is known about the CIA or the KGB or the Mossad. After I read the very badly written one page publisher’s note titled ‘Attention Authors’ which precedes everything else in this slim volume (of around 180 pages), I nearly stopped reading and threw away the book. However, I am glad I didn’t, since Maj Gen VK Singh’s English is relatively much better than that used in the publisher’s note, despite the publisher’s claim that ‘an author always gives the raw material in the shape of manuscript and it is the sense of publisher to make it a finished product.’

Singh was a senior army officer with 35 years’ experience in the Corps of Signals who joined RAW in the year 2000 at a relatively senior level (as a Joint Secretary) and served for 4 years, after which he retired. Singh was involved in various projects for upgrading RAW’s technical capability, which according to Singh, is not exactly the most advanced in the world.

India’s External Intelligence is a disappointment since Singh was solely involved in signal intelligence rather than human intelligence or even the analysis of gathered intelligence and doesn’t know much about, or at least, doesn’t reveal anything exciting about the workings of RAW. Many of the incidents which Singh discusses, such as CIA mole Rabinder Singh’s defection to the US, are already well-known and Singh doesn’t reveal anything which is not in the public domain. However, the various issues raised by Singh, are valid and important and Singh has, in my opinion, done yeoman service to India by writing this book. Is there a need to have better oversight over RAW, which according to Singh functions in a manner (corrupt and inefficient) not much different from any other department of the Indian government? Since intelligence obtained through technical sources, such as wiretapping etc. accounts for over 90% of total intelligence gathered, shouldn’t more resources be allocated to telecom teams? Shouldn’t the individuals running those teams be better qualified? Since there is so much overlapping between the functions of RAW, IB, Military Intelligence (MI) and dozen other agencies, which behave more like rivals rather than departments of the same government, shouldn’t RAW and IB be merged? The answers to all of this is, according to Singh, an unequivocal Yes.

Singh tells us that during the Kargil war, India made public a telephone conversation between General Pervez Musharaff and his Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General Mohammad Aziz, in order to prove Pakistan’s complicity and gain brownie points with the US and the United Nations. However, by doing so, India revealed to Pakistan that a particular satellite link between Beijing and Islamabad was being intercepted by RAW leading to its immediate closure. Of course, Singh mentions this in a very disapproving tone and gives the example of how during World War II, the Brits who had cracked the Enigma codes found out that the Luftwaffe was all set to bomb Coventry, but did not evacuate the city in order to not to tip off the Germans that the Enigma codes had been cracked. Many lives were lost, but the Germans continued to use Enigma codes. All of this sounds good, except that this is a very bad example. As Wikipedia can tell you, this anecdote (about Coventry) was put forth by a former RAF officer, but has since been discredited. Also, if India only wanted to gain brownie points with the US and the United Nations, the details of tapped call could have been provided to the US or UN officials in a confidential manner, couldn’t it? No, Singh doesn’t ask this question.

Singh’s narrative, though not very exciting, is very honest, though at times a tad clumsy. At the very outset, Singh makes it clear that he joined RAW not for career advancement or in search of adventure, but because if he had continued in the army, he would have had to retire in 2 years’ time, whereas by joining RAW, he got to work for 4 more years. Singh comes across as a man who wouldn’t tolerate the slightest indiscipline or infraction of procedure, traits which wouldn’t guarantee success while working for any civil administration anywhere in the world.

Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven – Book Review

2011-10-14T06:44:00.007+01:00

For the past many months, I have been planning to write an article on ‘when will Pakistan break-up?’ or ‘What should India do when Pakistan breaks-up?’ Well, I no longer have such plans, having just finished reading Anatol Lieven’s masterpiece on Pakistan where he convincingly argues that though Pakistan might be going through a very bad phase, it is not a failed country and is very likely to survive for quite some time to come. In fact, if Pakistan were to collapse, it is most likely to be the result of water shortages and other problems caused by climatic change, arising from over-exploitation of the waters of the Indus.

Lieven covered Pakistan as a journalist working for the Times and knows his subject matter very well. I doubt if there are many native Pakistanis who could analyse as well as Lieven the nitty-gritty of Pakistan’s internal divisions, both regional and sectoral (between the Shias and the Sunnis) and most importantly the challenges faced by Pakistan on account of the Taleban. Lieven’s account was such a pleasure to read and so very gripping that though it took me almost two weeks to finish the 560-odd page tome (which includes end-notes and the index), I felt sad when the book, like all good things, came to an end.

I learned so many knew things about Pakistan, I didn’t know before. For example, I had a vague idea that the Bhuttos and Zardaris were Shia, but I didn’t know that they displayed outward signs of being Sunni. Thanks to Hosseini’s Kite Runner, I used to think that the Hazaras are a downtrodden community on both sides of the Hindu-Kush. No, Lieven tells us that in Pakistan, the Hazaras (who had migrated from Afghanistan) are a relatively modern and prosperous community.

One of the most important stereotypes dismantled and put aside by Lieven is the one that Pakistan is a feudal society, not much different from 15th century England. No, rather it is one where ties of kinship are very strong. The head of the clan or tribe is expected to look after his people. For this, he squeezes out all that he can from the government, through corruption or otherwise, and spreads it around. Pakistan has one of the world’s highest rates of charitable giving per capita. Politicians are corrupt, but they work very hard in spreading the booty within their clan and support base. The politician who doesn’t do so, will be left without a clan before long. For this reason, Lieven says Imran Khan will not do particularly well in Pakistani politics since no one expects Imran Khan to have much loot to hand out. The army is very powerful and corrupt, but again, corruption is more in the form of standardized rewards for army officers, such as housing plots and plums postings after retirement, rather than individual officers diverting funds for their personal use without other officers knowing about it.

The most surprising thing about the growth of Islamic fundamentalism and the Taleban in Pakistan is that the duo is still so weak and their growth has been so slow. The obstacles to the growth of fundamentalism in Pakistan are the same as those which prevent the spread of democracy, namely kinship and nepotism which forces Pakistanis to resist change. Also, the Barelvi Islam followed by most Pakistanis is very different from the version espoused by the Taleban. Barelvis worship at the shrines of saints who they believe would intercede on their behalf with God and carry out miracles. In many cases, Shariah is actually a modernising force and is less harsh on women than customary laws like Pashtunwali followed by the Pathans or the customs of the Baloch. However, the laws implemented by many Teleban leaders in their areas of control within FATA or Khyber Pakhtunkhwa is a mix of the Shariah and Pashtunwali, with more of the latter than the former.

The most impressive aspect of Lieven’s treatise is his felicity in conveying to his readers the complexities of Pakistani society and politics in simple bytes. For example, when he talks of the Pathans, he tells us that they are ‘eighteenth century Scots without the alcohol.’ The Barelvis are compared to Catholics, if the Taleban can be called Puritans, that is. When discussing Punjabi attitudes to other ethnicities in Pakistan, we are told that:

'Punjabis from north central Punjab certainly feel superior to the other nationalities in Pakistan. They are harder working, better organised and more dynamic than anyone else in Pakistan except the Mohajirs. Punjabis respect Mohajirs, but since the latter are not farmers, they cannot really be fully fitted into the traditional Punjabi view of the world. For the Sindhis, the Punjabis have a rather amused and tolerant contempt, as for pleasant and easy-going, but lazy younger relatives. For the Baloch there is contempt without the tolerance, as primitive tribesmen sponging off Punjabi charity. Punjabis believe they are more modern and economically dynamic than the Pathans. Yet in Punjabi Muslim culture there is also an ingrained cultural and historical respect for the Muslim pastoral warriors who repeatedly swept across Punjab from Afghanistan, and from whom many Punjabis – especially in the upper classes – are or claim to be descended. And the Pathans, however savage are widely seen as Muslim warriors par excellence, who prowess has been celebrated in Pakistani literature and propaganda in all the modern wars from Kashmir to Afghanistan.'

Does Punjab dominate Pakistan? Yes, to some extend it does. However, Lieven doesn’t think it is entirely one-sided. Unlike the Sindhis, Balochis or Pathans, Punjabis identify themselves with Pakistan as a whole, to the point of almost submersion in Pakistan. They haven’t made any effort to develop Punjabi as a provincial language. ‘Whereas Sindhis and Pathans almost always speak Sindhi and Pashto among themselves, educated Punjabis usually speak Urdu with each other, when they are not speaking English.’ On top of this, Punjabis are not a monolithic group and there are so many divisions within Punjab. For example, in most of Southern Punjab, a distinct language called Seraiki is spoken.

Lieven does not seem to have much sympathy for the Baloch nationalist movement. Lieven quite rightly points out that though Balochistan occupies 43% of Pakistan’s land area, it has only 7% of Pakistan’s population. Therefore, crying out for a greater share of wealth, isn’t necessarily very fair. Lieven feels that, if Balochistan gained independence, ‘Baloch tribalism would reduce it to a Somali style nightmare, in which a rage of tribal parties – all calling themselves ‘democratic’ and ‘national’ – under rival warlords would fight for power and wealth.’

Lieven keeps asking around for information and comes up with gems. For example, a military acquaintance tells Lieven that ‘while A.Q. Khan certainly profited personally from some of his deals, at no stage was he truly a ‘rogue’ element. Rather, every Pakistani president and chief of army staff knew in broad outline what A.Q. Khan was doing. They might not necessarily have approved in detail – but then again, they took good care not to find out in detail. ‘He had been told, “get us a bomb at all costs”, and this is what he did.’’ All of this makes a lot of sense.

A former minister in Nawaz Sharif’s cabinet sums up his character for Lieven as ‘not at all educated but very shrewd, intelligent, determined and courageous. But unfortunately also autocratic, impulsive, reckless and hot-tempered, which has often been his downfall.’ This descripton differs rather drastically from the one provided by Ahmed Rashid in his Descent into Chaos.

Lieven has a good eye which notices the small things as well. While visiting Nawabzada Bugti, a Baloch leader, he comes across Bugti’s ‘small, thin, dark-skinned servants’ who are called ‘Mrattas’, since they are apparently descendants of Marathas from central India, captured in war by the Mughal emperors and given to their Bugti troops in lieu of wages. I’ve never heard of this community before. I assume they have converted to Islam. Does the Indian government have any plans to seek their repatriation, I wonder? Would the Mrattas want to be repatriated?

Lieven’s conclusions are interesting – they could have been made by a nationalist Pakistani politician. Lieven asserts that the US led campaign in Afghanistan has been responsible, above everything else, for increasing Islamist insurgency and terrorism in Pakistan since 2001. Lieven wants the US and other coalition forces to recognise that ‘Pakistan’s goals are in part legitimate, even if the means by which they have been sought have not been and this legitimacy needs to be recognised by the West’. Pleading for restraint in drone attacks on targets in Pakistan, Lieven is vehement that US ground troops should not be inducted into Afghanistan. Rather, he would have the US and Pakistan negotiate with the Taleban. I can’t say I fully agree with Lieven, though this position is understandable. For Lieven, the Taleban are just a manifestation of Pashtun society. In the past, even during the time the British ruled India, it was common for religion to be used to rally the Pathans against outsiders. After, Pathans are always willing to die for Islam, though they don’t necessarily live by it.

Lieven briefly says in his conclusion that a collapse of Pakistan will be disastrous for India too, generating chaos which will destabilise the whole region. Lieven does not explain this in detail. I had taken a similar position in this post published over two years ago.

Why Are Food Prices So High In India?

2011-10-09T18:10:00.003+01:00

Recently I happened to buy a one-litre bottle of sunflower oil from a mom & pop shop in Bandra. Usually I buy a number of items from this shop and the bill ranges from a few hundred rupees to a couple of thousand. This time I had nothing else to buy and so I noticed that I was paying one hundred and forty rupees for a litre of sunflower oil. I was on my way home after work and didn’t think much about it. However, something about the price kept nagging me.

Ever since I returned to India around nine months ago after over eight years in the UK, I have been trying to come to terms with the new India. There are so many more cars on the roads, shopping malls everywhere, new restaurants opening every month and of course, everything is a lot more expensive. However, one hundred and forty rupees for a litre of sunflower oil seemed excessive. On a lark, I went to Tesco’s website and checked the price of a litre of sunflower oil in the UK. For those who haven’t been to the UK, Tesco is the largest retail chain in the UK and commands over a 30% share of the UK retail market. It a middle-class chain, slightly cheaper than Sainsbury’s but not as dirt cheap as Lidl. Like other retail chains in the developed west, Tesco is good at sourcing supplies (mainly food, but also clothes and home appliances to a lesser extent) cheaply and selling them to its customers at wafer thin margins.

Well, as I expected, the price of a litre of sunflower oil at Tesco is less than what I had paid in Bandra! Tesco branded sunflower oil was the cheapest, but other brands too cost less than Rs. 140. Here, you can use this price-checker to find out how much any particular grocery item costs in Tesco’s UK outlets. And this website will give you the current rupee exchange rate for the British pound.

Almost everything sold in the UK is grown or manufactured elsewhere. Many countries in the European Union, like France produce sunflower oil. However, production within the EU does not meet local demand and Ukraine is the largest exporter of sunflower oil to the UK, followed by countries such as Argentina and South Africa. The sunflower oil sold at Tesco is sourced from outside the UK. Even after accounting for the fact that Tesco has great bargaining power and can source its supplies very cheaply, most probably directly from the farmer, one has to make allowance for the much higher establishment costs in the UK and the small margin Tesco pays itself.

There can be only one explanation for this high price consumers pay in India for staple items such as sunflower oil. Since Indian farmers are not obviously being paid a lot of money for their produce, middle-men, with political patronage must be hoarding sunflower oil stocks, driving up prices and taking a huge cut for themselves. I can afford to pay one hundred and forty rupees for a litre of sunflower oil. I wonder how many Indians can do the same without heartburn.

“Ithaca” by David Davidar – Book Review

2011-10-04T11:03:00.020+01:00

The blurb to David Davidar’s latest – third – novel gives the following information: “In the early years of the 21st Century, sweeping change is taking place in the publishing industry. Ill-equipped to handle the transformation of their world, a number of publishing houses struggle to survive – one of these is Litmus, an independent firm in the UK. The onus of ensuring that the company remains viable falls upon its publisher, Zachariah Thomas, who also edits its most successful author, Massimo Seppi. Seppi’s quartet of novels, featuring angels and archangels, has sold millions of copies worldwide.

Unfortunately for Zach and for Litmus, Seppi dies unexpectedly. Without its star writer, Litmus’s chances of surviving the economic downturn are slim, and when a giant corporation intent on taking it over begins to move in for the kill, it seems impossible that Litmus will remain independent. To keep his company intact, and to give it room to regroup and chart out a strategy for the future, Zach must, among other things, try and mine the Seppi legacy for one last gem. He travels around the globe, from London to the new Litmus subsidiary in Delhi, from negotiating meetings in Toronto to the halls of the renowned Frankfurt Book Fair, from a sales extravaganza in New York City to the streets of Sydney, and more, in his quest to stave off disaster.”

The blurb isn’t exactly accurate. Not really, no. The trip to Delhi, a detour while travelling (from London) to Toronto, has nothing to do with mining the Seppi legacy and the trip to Sydney is to take part in a panel discussion on the editor’s changing role in publishing, and to give a talk on the life of Massimo Seppi and the five great Angel books. To be honest, only the trip to Toronto is part of the sieving of the Seppi estate for gold nuggets. In fact, the novel, as much a travelogue as it is work of fiction, is divided into 9 chapters and the first seven are named after cities visited by Zach!

Ithaca is a novel by a publisher, about publishing, for those interested in knowing how publishers live, eat, drink, copulate, satisfy their egos and make money. Davidar is in his element in Ithaca, protagonist Zachariah Thomas’s life closely mirrors Davidar’s own story and Davidar spins a tale which is interesting and exciting and makes Ithaca a worthwhile read. In any event, it is a much better book than Davidar’s first one – the House of Blue Mangoes. (Disclosure: I haven’t read Davidar’s second novel – The Solitude of Emperors.)

Davidar’s story telling doesn’t have the sheer effortlessness of R.K. Narayan or of Jhumpa Lahiri and Ithaca is more like a work of art painstakingly put together by a talented craftsman than a work of genius, though Ithaca’s pace is not as much forced or strained as in the House of Blue Mangoes. The story is narrated by an omnipresent third person, mostly in the present tense. Narrating in the present tense is tricky business when it is done at length, since the narrator is bound to use the past time at times and has to frequently revert to the present at just the right moment. A few sentences’ delay can get the reader muddled up. Davidar however, is a master of the craft of writing and gets his tenses right to the last T.

WARNING – SPOILERS AHEAD

Some of the best things about Ithaca are the various anecdotes about publishing and the various larger than life characters who patrol the streets and bylanes of the publishing world. We are told that during the Frankfurt Book Fair, the 'whores go on holiday since all the publisher folk are busy fucking each other, both literally and metaphorically'. Publishers are no different from other corporate houses when it comes to profits, balance-sheets and slogans. Litmus has a slogan – we are the test of a good book. Globish, the giant corporation which wants to acquire Litmus, has values too, in addition to a slogan. Everyone interested in books would know of the Big 6 Publishers. Davidar expands this list to add Globish and makes it the Big 7.

Time and again, Zach is heard to say what a great privilege and honour it is to be in publishing. ‘He goes to lunches and drinks and suppers with agents and publishing colleagues he has worked with for over a decade, men and women he likes and respects for the most part, all joined shoulder to shoulder in an endeavour that they have worked hard to perfect throughout their adult lives – the task of finding, valuing an selling worthwhile writing, which despite all the algorithms and business models that attempt to convert it into something that can be weighed and measured like any other product is ultimately elusive and therefore all the more precious. All its disadvantages notwithstanding, to be part of this world is a privilege and he is proud to belong to this company of men and women, who for centuries have nurtured the mother of all creative arts, story-telling, with dedication and skill.’

Though Litmus is shown to be based in London’s West End, in Soho, some of the descriptions given by Davidar, gave me the feeling that it is based in the US. There is talk of firing people, without the need to follow a hundred procedures and having consultations, something which happens in the US, but not in the UK. One of Zach’s colleagues is heard demanding a perfume policy, again a concept much more common in litigious USA than in the UK.

Some of the best stories in Ithaca come out of Zach’s Delhi trip, which, by the way, is a detour while flying to Toronto! I guess this detour would have made a simple 7 hour trip a 24 hour one. Some detour it would be, but I am glad Zach did it. There are stories of Salman Rushdie’s book reading at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, after he won the Booker, stories of how Penguin India was set up by a couple of visionaries (no, the name Davidar doesn’t crop up), stories of how Vikram Seth’s Suitable Boy had to be printed on paper used in Bibles, to be able to cram it all in.

At times, Davidar’s descriptions take Ithaca to the realm of pulp fiction. We are told that ‘If publishing has an evolutionary scale, after hundreds of years of natural selection, what has risen to the top is a formidable creature – the Manhattan based publisher of a large publishing company. Capable of stopping a Bengal tiger in mid-spring or charming a swallow out of its nest, this paragon is usually a woman of indeterminate age, with the ability to bed a room full of New Yorkers (unanimously regarded as the toughest and most cynical people in publishing anywhere) to her will, or to make a steeling agent see reason, or to have one of the planet’s biggest authors eating out of her hand.’ All of this makes for good reading.

For me, the best bit of the novel is when Zach goes to the Frankfurt Book Fair where publishers and literary agents meet, a place where a writer has no place, unless the writer is a VIEW – a Very Important Eminent Writer. We do meet one writer who turns up at Frankfurt, one who isn’t a VIEW and he cuts a pathetic figure. The most important section of the Frankfurt Fair is Halle 8, where the UK and US publishers congregate.

Almost as interesting as the publishing anecdotes are the ‘tourist tales’, as Zachariah Thomas trots the globe, for business and for pleasure. The novel commences with a holiday in Bhutan and we are told that only 8 pilots are qualified to land at Bhutan’s only airport, which is surrounded by mountains and overshooting the runway would result in the plane crashing into one. Do watch this YouTube video to decide for yourself how scary an experience it is to land at Paro. Zach eschews Ema Datse, but partakes of Bhutan Mist. I don’t blame Zach, if I ever go to Thimbu, I’d do the same.

Many of the restaurants where Zach goes out to wine and dine are real ones and more importantly, famous ones. Zach lunches at the Orso in Soho. When in Frankfurt for the Frankfurt Book Fair, Zach goes to an authentic German restaurant, the Wagner at Sachsenhausen, where he drinks apfelwein (apple wine) and stuffs himself with different meats.

Ithaca’s basic plot is good and Davidar takes maybe one-third of this 273 page book to execute it. As hinted in the blurb, the plot revolves around reviving Litmus’s fortunes by extracting the last Seppi stone and fighting off the attempt by Globish to acquire Litmus. Equally important to the reader is Zach’s return to his Ithaca. The quotes from Cavafy’s Ithaka given at the beginning of the novel and before each of the three parts of the book ensure that this isn’t forgotten. Where is Zach’s Ithaca? Is it London where Zach has spent most of his adult life? No. Hold your breath - It is in India! You see, it was a total surprise to me when after around 20 pages, Davidar casually mentions Zach’s undergrad days in Delhi. But where exactly is Zach from? Is he a Delhite? Many pages later, we are given another hint of Zach’s heritage – the memory of Zach’s ‘grandmother in Kanyakumari making puttu, steamed and fragrant that he would dissolve in coconut milk or meat stew.’ Later we are categorically told that Zach’s father was a manager at a coffee estate in the Shevaroy Hills of Tamil Nadu. Yercaud, a hill station in the Shevaroy Hills is Zach’s Ithaca. In Homer's Odyssey, Ulysses manages to get back to Ithaca. In the House of Blue Mangoes, Kannan gets back to Doraipuram in Chevathar. Does Zach go back to Yercaud? Does he take his estranged English wife Julia Spence with him or does he merely hope to do so, just as Kannan is seen hoping (to get his estranged Anglo-Indian wife Helen to Doraipuram) towards the end of the House of Blue Mangoes? Do read this extremely readable book to find out.

Davidar doesn’t seem to believe in the principle of ‘show, don’t tell’. There are numerous instances where the reader receives a brief, very brief, bio of a particular character and because Davidar keeps his telling so succinct, with a hidden surprise or two, Ithaca is none the worse for this. For example, we get to know all of a sudden that Zach’s mother is English. Later, when Zach’s wife Julia meets his parents, she gets along with his father, but not with his mother (though they are both English) and we don’t really get to know why. In all probability, Davidar doesn’t know either.

Notwithstanding Zach’s anglicised demeanour, an English mother and half his life-time spent in London, we hear that Zach still holds an Indian passport and a couple of times, the possibility of Zach returning to India is considered. Every Indian who has lived overseas knows how difficult it is to get a visa in time for a quick trip to another western destination. However, not once do we see Zach stand in a visa queue or worry about getting a visa in time for a trip, though he is a jet-setter who hops into a plane at the drop of a hat.

Davidar doesn’t always connect the dots. We are introduced to Caryn Bianci, Massimo Seppi’s translator. We are told that she is ‘a native of Montreal and formed part of the great Anglophone exodus from what was then Canada’s cultural epicenter during the political disturbances of the 1970s.’ Nowhere does the reader get an explanation as to when and how Bianci learnt Italian formally, if at all. The Italian surname is deemed to be sufficient explanation and we move on, at no cost to the story.

How did Zach end up with the name Zachariah Thomas? There is a casual reference to Zach’s father as ‘Nirmal Aiyah’. For those who don’t speak Tamil, ‘Aiyah’ is a Tamil honorific, someone on the lines of ‘Ji’ in Hindi or ‘San’ in Japanese. Was Zach’s father’s name Nirmal Thomas? Maybe or maybe not, since South Indians do not usually have a surname. In any event, the reader is left to figure this one out.

Does the world of publishing suffer from racism or prejudice (on the basis of race)? Zach certainly does not suffer from its ill-effects. In fact, Zach seems to be the poster child for globalization, the very picture of seamless integration, wherever he is. It is not only Zach who is so well-integrated into a foreign environment. When Zach holidays in Bhutan at the beginning of this story, he runs into an old friend from college, Das and his wife Sonam who have lived in Thimpu for 17 years. Again, there is no mention of any trouble in getting residence permits to stay in the hermit kingdom. Das and Sonam are so well integrated, they actually use ‘We’ when defending Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index.

Will publishing houses soon become extinct? Are ebooks and digital editions the only way forward? These questions are debated endlessly by Zach and some of the many people he encounters in the course of his travels. These arguments are a bit one-sided, since the characters who predict the demise of publishing houses like Litmus are, well, not so likeable, people like Prof. Malik, while the ones who feel publishers will always be around, playing a crucial role in selecting what the public reads, are respectable veterans like ninety year old Alfred Rothstein. In fact, one comes back with the feeling that even if large publishing houses like Globish bite the dust, smaller ones like Litmus which are offer customised, bespoke services, will definitely survive. One doesn’t feel too bad about this. Globish is not the nicest place to work for, while Litmus leaves one with a lovey-dovey feeling. Globish fires its employees at the drop of a hat and its London office is in Camden, in dreary North London, while Litmus is in leafy Soho, in the West End.

Zach is shown to be a sensitive chap, one who hates firing people. Davidar goes to the extent of saying that firing people is the most difficult task Zach has to perform as a senior executive, one which he does not hand over to HR. Zach is unsure if ‘slow, compassionate strangling’ at his hands is less painful for the employee ‘than the swift bite of the guillotine’ at the hands of the HR officer, but this doesn’t make him delegate this job. Zach is also incapable of firing his latest girl friend Mandy, who is shown to be shallow and unsuitable for Zach, who so very desperately wants to get back with his wife Julia. Mandy, part-time waitress and wanna-be actress, is finally fired and she returns to hack into Zach’s email and sends nasty and vulgar mails to all his contacts. Does Zach retaliate? Of course, not!

Some of the characters who populate Ithaca are straight out of folklore. There’s Ramesh Wadhwani with whom Zach has dinner in Delhi, who knows all that’s there to know about Indian publishing and lives a life devoted to books. His US equivalent, Alfred Rothstein, Zach meets with in New York. Then there are people like Mortimer Weaver, the CEO of Globish, who have been created to be hated. There are characters like Simon Prescott, the editor of Bibliomania who are meant to be detested. I found Weaver and Prescott to be unrealistic. For example, Weaver is shown to be a cut-throat businessman, but what made him so? Apparently, he was once accused of financial impropriety by a colleague and from then on, he never trusted anyone.

Zach’s India, just like the India in the House of Blue Mangoes, is clean, tidy and mainly rural, at times tough and nasty, but never dirty. If Aaron Daniel is tortured to death by a British policeman, Zach is ragged by a bunch of nasty seniors, who force him to eat a hundred red-hot chillies and then drink soapy water. However, Zach is just as stoic as Aaron and as brave as Kannan, minus Kannan’s trademark tears. There are a few other bits in the novel which aren’t particularly realistic. We are told that when Zach was ten, ‘he was sent to boarding school. It was a tough school and he was the outsider; the student body was largely blue collar and resented his family’s wealth and his life of apparent privilege. He had to fight and fight often just to be left alone.’ True, boarding schools can be tough, but show me one Indian boarding school which has largely blue collar students and where the son of a coffee estate manager is considered to be from a wealthy family.

In this book, Davidar has some very good advice for first time novelists. Also, there are a dozen other things I could comment on. However, I shall stop here and leave it to you to read and find out for yourself.

Here are a few other reviews of Ithaca:

The Hindu is positive.

Mint's review is not so positive.

Outlook is a bit nasty.

As Expected, Obama Lets The Palestinians Down

2011-09-29T15:00:00.011+01:00

As we all know, Obama assumed office under a welter of expectations, some of which were impractical and even unreasonable. There was no reason to expect that a man who got the support of a majority of the American people would veer off the mainstream course by more than a few inches. Nevertheless, there was optimism in the air and a feeling that change was underway. The Israeli-Palestinian issue was one area where it was hoped that Barack Hussein Obama, with his Indonesian childhood and Islamic heritage, would make a major contribution. Obama’s Cairo speech added fuel to the buring hope.

I wasn't too impressed with Obama’s Cairo speech and I had said so in this post. Now that Obama has refused to support the Palestinian bid for statehood, it looks as if all my worst fears about Obama have been confirmed.

I consider myself a friend of Israel. I have visited Israel as a tourist and had a grand time there. I believe that Israel has the right to a peaceful existence. However, let us not forget that Israel was created by a UN resolution backed by member states who were horrified at what Jews had undergone during the Second World War. The UN resolution which gave birth to Israel also provided for a Palestinian state. The least Israel can do is to respect the UN resolution which created it and allow the Palestinians to have a homeland of their own as well, as per the terms of the same UN resolution. By not reverting to the pre-1967 boundaries and by continuing to build settlements in the occupied territories, Israel is being very unreasonable, ungrateful even, to the rest of the world.

A year ago, if the US had refused to support a bid such as the one currently being made by the Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, no one would have batted an eyelid. Now, things have changed. Israel is rapidly running out of friends in its neighbourhood. The US is still a superpower, but nowhere as powerful as it used to be. Arabs in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt have overthrown their rulers and countries like Syria and Yemen are in turmoil. The new regimes in these countries will do more than offer platitudes to the Palestinians. The most important Muslim majority country in Israel’s neighbourhood, Turkey, is now ruled not by its secular armed forces, but by an Islamic party under the leadership of the extremely shrewd Recep Tayeb Erdogan. The US is having a horrible time in Afghanistan. Iraq is stable, but is under Iran’s shadow and control.

In short, this is a very bad time for the US to upset the Palestinians and tell them that they can have a state of their own only when the Israelis decide to allow them to have one. Nevertheless, thanks to domestic compulsions, Obama is planning to do just that.

“The Suicide Banker” by Puneet Gupta – Book Review

2011-09-26T12:49:00.020+01:00

Stephen Frey runs a private equity firm in the US. Frey also happens to be a novelist. Maybe I should have put it the other way around – Frey is a famous novelist who happens to run a private equity firm. It doesn’t really matter, does it? A former M&A specialist with JP Morgan, Frey has written a series of financial crime novels, all of which have been bestsellers. I have been a long time fan of Frey and often wondered when India would get its first financial thriller, one as good as a Frey novel. Puneet Gupta, a career banker, has written a novel revolving around banking fraud which I believe is the first of its kind in Indian literature. Is Gupta as good as Frey? Or is he even better? It was with a great deal of hope and anticipation that I started reading The Suicide Banker.

Sumit Sharma gives up a comfortable job with the State Bank of India to join Citizen Bank, which Gupta tells us ‘was the leading multinational financier of cars/commercial vehicles in India’. His world changes all of a sudden. He now gets paid a lot more money. He is in a posh world where the toilet looks as good as that in a five star hotel, but the urinal’s flush has a leak that can drench the front of a man’s trousers. Sumit is a victim of the erring faucet just before he is about to be interviewed. Nevertheless, Sumit gets the job and the reader gets to see, hear and touch a typical MNC Bank, the sort which can be found dime a dozen in India these days and one gets to soak up the atmosphere easily. Results (profits) matter and it’s the only thing which seems to matter. Employees are treated as resources and nothing more. Sumit is offered a job in Mumbai, kept waiting for a few days, allocated a position in Goa, one which will start after three months, sent to Pune in the interim and then transferred to Jaipur where an important post has unexpectedly fallen vacant – all of this within a month of joining. The threat of being fired is left dangling, right from day one. ‘To err may be human, but to forgive is not Citizen Bank’s policy.’

There’s always the hint of fraud taking place on a massive scale, even the Prologue describes one, and soon one sees Sumit, in his role as a credit manager, struggling to control the excesses of his fellow bankers. Soon after Sumit joins the Citizen Bank, Gupta introduces his readers to Ind-Credit Bank. Ind-Credit is about to venture into agricultural or rural banking, mainly as a result of pressure from the Reserve Bank of India which wants Ind-Credit Bank to discharge its social obligations like every other Indian bank and serve the poor and marginalised sections of society. Ind-Credit Bank is good at turning conventional wisdom upside down and follows this approach as it makes a foray into agri-banking, under the leadership of Mohit Saxena, a banker with 22 years’ experience with Asian Development Bank. Mohit has even worked with Prof Mohannad Yunnus, the founder of Grameen Bank.

After Sumit completes a year at Citizen Bank’s Jaipur branch, star performer Anupam Arora lands up. Sumit is given a very tough time by Anupam, who will never take no for an answer as he presses Sumit to clear vehicle-loan proposals for his customers. Anupam is a fraudster and Sumit soon unravels his modus operandi after some diligent investigation. Anupam bites the dust, which is to say, he is fired, but moves to another bank at a higher salary. Sumit bags the Citizen Bank star performer award and a promotion. Two months later, Sumit joins Ind-Credit Bank in Mumbai.

Gupta takes us to Sumit’s home and introduces us to his wife Shalini and toddler son Shibu, who is a year and a half old when the story begins. Like many hardworking bankers, Sumit does not get to spend much time with Shalini and Shibu. Shalini used to be a journalist with the Times of India, but she has become a stay-at-home mom. After Sumit joins Ind-Credit Bank in Mumbai, Shalini goes back to work, joining NewsFirst a 24x7 news channel. I didn’t think Shalini’s character has been properly fleshed out by Gupta. Most of the time, Shalini appears to be cross with Sumit for working long hours or for not caring for Shibu. Once she starts working, Shalini is shown to be a career woman who quickly makes it big as a chat show anchor, effortlessly handling discussions on topics such as polygamy. There are a few instances when Sumit manages to spend time with Shalini, such as when they take a holiday in Kashmir, leaving Shibu behind with his grandparents, that we hear the sort of romantic dialogues that wouldn’t be out of place in a Bollywood movie.

We do not hear or see much of Sumit’s move from Jaipur to Mumbai. Was Shalini happy to move to Mumbai? One moment we see Sumit quitting Citizen Bank to join Ind-Credit Bank and the next we see him is at a gala function at the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai where top performers from Ind-Credit Bank’s agri-business are given awards. To create a rural flavour, the attire is traditional. Men wear khadi-kurta pyajamas (sic) and women wear cotton saris. The venue has rural and folk paintings on the wall and husk piles, earthern pots, bamboo sticks, lanterns etc. add to the atmosphere.

Sumit does not cease to unravel fraud even after joining Ind-Credit Bank where in his role as head of credit monitoring, he reviews and tracks the bank’s portfolio performance. We see Sumit struggle to gather data from bankers, we see his warnings being disregarded as the agri-business continues to expand fast, setting new records, we see Sumit not getting the support he needs from his boss and we also see Sumit soldier on despite so many handicaps. First Sumit unravels a small fraud, one committed by an employee, Hardeep Desai, who is literally on crutches. Sumit journeys to distant Bhuj to investigate and deliver justice, arm twisting a low level ‘docboy’ to confess in a manner which any Indian policeman would have been proud of. The fraud he uncovers is a victimless one, where neither the bank nor the customer has lost any money. However, Ind-Credit Bank has a policy of zero tolerance towards fraud and handicapped Hardeep Desai is sacked. We don’t see Sumit shedding tears over this incident as he grimly moves on, comforting himself with verses from the Bhagvad Gita suggest that a karma-yogi will do his duty, without attachment, come what may.

The agri-business at Ind-Credit Bank seems to be doing exceedingly well and no one has the appetite for bad news. Sumit is accused by his boss of behaving like a ‘jehadi with a suicide jacket’ after he makes a presentation which ruthlessly analyses the credit franchisee model used by the agri-business. ‘Well, I may be a suicide banker, but not a suicide bomber,’ is Sumit’s tart retort to the accusation. Sumit is soon convinced that there is a ‘bubble build-up’ in the agri-business. Self-conviction is, however, a far cry from absolute proof and Sumit doesn’t find many takers for his allegations and his marriage is on the rocks. The only one who reposes some faith in him is Ravi Kant, his ex-boss at Citizen Bank. Encouraged by Ravi Kant, Sumit decides to expose the guilty and save Ind-Credit Bank’s customers. All of which is easier said that done. Ultimately Sumit is forced to rely on subterfuge (which includes breaking the law) to obtain evidence, which he mails to the independent directors on the Board of Ind-Credit Bank. All hell breaks loose. I didn’t like the fact that Sumit broke the law to obtain the evidence which nailed the truth, just as he did in Hardeep Desai’s case. Couldn’t Gupta have found some other way of bringing out the truth? Do please read this novel to find out exactly how Sumit pricks the agri-banking bubble.

Gupta’s writes in the sort of every-day English used by Indian professionals. Jargon of the variety one hears in Indian banking circles is used aplenty in The Suicide Banker. The banking world described by Gupta is 24 carat and authentic. We hear Ind-Credit Bank’s CEO explain how ‘There are times when the risk to remain tight in the bud is more painful than the risk it takes to blossom.’ I did end up wishing Gupta’s language were more elegant. The text below is a case in point.

‘How the results look like?’ Mohit had seen the provisional quarterly results yesterday, but knew a lot can change before they are finally released.

‘How the results look like?’ is grammatically wrong, but this incorrect sentence is acceptable when it is spoken by a banker, one who is not a native English speaker and who has obviously not been hired on the basis of his linguistic ability. However, what follows afterwards is the third party narrator’s language and here, there is no excuse for the faulty English. Faux pas such as this are very common in The Suicide Banker, atleast one every few pages of this 279-page book. The Suicide Banker would have been a much better read if its prose had been of a higher standard. At the very least, the editors could have corrected the obvious grammatical errors.

Gupta uses a few flash-backs which do not work very well and I was left confused. Ind-Credit Bank was introduced and its foray into the agri-business explained pretty soon after the novel began and Sumit had just joined Citizen Bank. This didn’t make much sense, until Sumit suddenly quits the Citizen Bank, for no particular reason, to join Ind-Credit Bank. Gupta tells us that ‘he got an excellent opportunity to join Ind-Credit Bank and he happily accepted it.’ Was it the promise of more money? Maybe, since we later see Sumit get a cubicle for himself. When Sumit joins Ind-Credit Bank, its agri-banking division (headed by Mohit Saxena) is booming. We are told that ‘Everyone at Ind-Credit Bank dreamt of becoming a part of the Agri-Business (caps-sic). With zero defaults and a strong portfolio growth, it was a hot potato with the entire banking industry, boasting of its miraculous success. The team that created the agri-strategy, was intact and reaped the benefits of its success. They got fabulous mid-year promotions, bonuses and ESOPs. As the business grew, the team expanded and by the end of second year, there were about 800 people in the Agri-Business team. Mohit Saxena had done a fabulous job of building this business.’

Towards the end, as Sumit gets to grips with the fraud being perpetuated by the agri-business division, I started feeling that Gupta’s description of the toilet at Citizen Bank, one which could be from a five star hotel, but which has a leaky faucet and could drench the front of any user’s trousers, could be an euphemism for the state of India’s private sector banks. Citizen Bank is an MNC Bank, but interestingly, Gupta never tells his readers if Ind-Credit Bank is also an MNC Bank. We only know that it is a leading private sector bank.

If Gupta hasn’t done a good job in sketching Shalini’s character, he makes up for that with his depiction of the various bankers and their clients who form part of this story. For example, we get to meet Tulsi Ram who is a client of Citizen Bank and holds a job as the head clerk at a government school in Rajasthan. We are told that Tulsi Ram runs a transport business, one which consumes most of his time. Nevertheless, Tulsi Ram manages to get to his school 4 times every month, always on a Thursday when the local transport market is closed. Tulsi Ram unfailingly charges a 2 per cent commission for processing the salaries of his colleagues at the government school.

Sumit might be a diligent credit officer, but he is not without his prejudices. ‘No girls in my team,’ Sumit has instructed his sub-ordinates. Gupta tells us that Sumit believed ‘girls were slow at work, felt ill at will, wouldn’t stay late and worst of all, they couldn’t be scolded. Handling women staff had been a tricky issue for him.’ However, when a sub-ordinate Alex Stuart requests him to hire his cousin Annie Mathew, Sumit agrees. Annie is shown to be a non-descript girl who works hard and keeps a low profile. Annie’s position in the Bank is not exactly clear, though it appears to be that of an intern or a trainee. Sumit encourages Annie to enrol for a part-time MBA. Pretty soon after Annie joins his team, we find Sumit liking Annie more than would be normal in the given circumstances. ‘She looked up and their eyes met. No makeup, Sumit noticed. Hair in ponytail. She was not very attractive, but Sumit found something very feminine about her. He could relate her to a slim, little malnourished, sultry tribal girl’. Pretty soon Sumit and Annie are having a roaring affair.

I didn’t find Annie Mathew’s and Alex Stuart’s characters to be realistic. For one, both are shown to be Marathi speakers! Later it turns out Alex is not Annie’s cousin, but an ex-boyfriend, who still wants favours from Annie. Towards the end, when Sumit needs to collect evidence to uncover the fraud being perpetuated by the agri-business, he enlists Annie’s help and she duly complies. Annie, silent, diligent and obedient, comes across as yet another two-dimensional stereotype.

Just as in the movies, many times Sumit isn’t around when Shalini and Shibu need him. There is the expected scene when Shibu is ill and Sumit is too busy with his new job at Ind-Credit Bank to help out. In another incident, Shibu’s school takes him on a day’s excursion to the Byculla zoo, but doesn’t bring him back. Shalini desperately tries to reach Sumit on his mobile, but Sumit is out romancing with Annie. Towards the end, after the bad guys have been exposed (with a lot of assistance from Annie) and Sumit leaves Ind-Credit Bank, we don’t get to know if he intends to keep seeing Annie.

Gupta’s prose might be below par, but the various jokes, one-liners and banking anecdotes which litter this novel are not. Here’s a sample: ‘HR might not be the busiest department, but it always pretended to be so.’ Some of the jokes are crude and stereotyped, such as the description of a high performing female banker who is said to have seen more laps than a napkin, but then no one has accused bankers of excessive political correctness.

One of the things I didn’t like about The Suicide Banker was that for someone without much knowledge of Indian banks, many details remain fuzzy and unclear. For example, it isn’t clear what exactly Sumit would be doing at Citizen Bank for quite some time after he starts his new job. At one point, Sumit is referred to as the future branch head for Goa. In Jaipur, he is shown to be the branch manager and yet he seems to be shit scared of Anupam Arora. Didn’t Arora report to the branch manager? The role of a credit manager – to analyse the credit worthiness of a potential client and to recommend a credit limit – could have been explained better at the outset. I am not sure if the average Joe who reads The Suicide Banker would figure out the hierarchies and verticals that characterise the average financial institution. What the heck, it is not even clear if Sumit is, like most credit managers, a chartered accountant. I got the (vague) impression that he is an MBA. One of the best things about industry specific novels like Hotel, Airport, Wheels, Moneychangers etc. (all of them by Arthur Hailey) is that not only are they very exciting, they also explain in a simple manner the workings of a specific industry to outsiders. The Suicide Banker on the other hand seems to have been written by a banker for other bankers, with so many descriptions and anecdotes that would be decipherable only to industry insiders.

One of the best bits about The Suicide Banker is the introspection which Sumit goes through after exposing each fraud and getting a few bankers into serious trouble. The final coup in the agri-business matter, sets a few thousand heads rolling. Sumit is not upset and he (rightly in my opinion) justifies his actions to himself, quoting from the Bhagvad Gita as he does. His only grumble seems to that he doesn’t get any publicity or credit for his actions.

This has turned out to be a longer review than I intended it to be. To sum up, The Suicide Banker is a very authentic description of the Indian banking scene and gives a realistic picture of the various hanky-panky activities some players indulge in to make more money. This is not very surprising since Gupta concedes in the Acknowledgements section that ‘many incidents in this novel are based on real events.’ He further concedes that ‘I am grateful to my ex-employers for providing me with such eye-opening learning opportunities.’ The language used is appropriate for dialogues between bankers, but the third party narrator’s prose ought to have been much better. Instead, it grinds along the same rut as the dialogues, errors, jargon and all. Gupta’s canvass is wide and stretches from the posh Bandra-Kurla Complex in Mumbai to rustic Jaipur. Descriptions of bankers and their clients are very good, but that of the wife and girlfriend aren’t half as good. Despite all this, I would rate this novel as an interesting read, especially for bankers and for those curious to know how bankers make so much money and get away with it.

Is Gupta as good as Frey? No, he isn’t and my search for that un-put-downable Indian financial thriller continues.

“River of Smoke” by Amitav Ghosh – Book Review

2011-09-22T01:59:00.019+01:00

The empire building that took place on such a grand scale from the eighteenth century until the middle of the twentieth century went hand in hand with the development and promotion of trade, commerce and industry by the empire builders. Some of the trade and industry that developed during the course of empire building was good. Some were not. The slave trade and the opium trade were two of the most evil trades which flourished in that period. In both these, the empire builders were ably assisted by the people they had subjugated. The slave trade could not have been carried out so efficiently without the assistance of the Arab intermediaries and African slave-catchers. Similarly, the forced cultivation of opium in India, at a terrible cost to the Indian peasantry and the dumping of that opium in China required the active support of many tens of thousands of Indians and Chinese and many of those Indian and Chinese intermediaries grew rich and fat from that evil trade. Many of Mumbai’s philanthropists, well-known names like David Sassoon, Pestonjee Wadia, Jamsetji Jeejeebhoy, Jamsetji Tata, were all involved in the opium trade, which was where they made their money before moving on to different things.

The second book in Amitav Ghosh’s historical trilogy on the opium trade, River of Smoke, continues from where Ghosh had left off in the first book, the Sea of Poppies. Some of the characters who were on the Ibis can be found in the River of Smoke, which commences with a setting in Mauritius before moving to Canton which it stays almost until the end. Just as in the Sea of Poppies, Ghosh’s latest offering is crammed with jargon, slang, characters and cross-cultural currents. Europeans might be in charge at Fanqui town, but Ghosh makes sure that subaltern voices are also heard, as loudly as that of their masters. Equally loud and clear is the voice of the Chinese mandarins, especially that of the High Commissioner Lin Tse-hsu, who is sent to Canton with a specific mandate to put down the opium trade which is costing China dear. Ghosh’s respect for Commissioner Lin at times changes to breathless awe and admiration. The novel ends with a standoff between Western merchants in Canton and the Chinese mandarins, which will soon lead to the Opium War (1839-1842).

Seth Bahram Modi, a self-made man and the most successful Parsi merchant in Fanqui town, plays the lead role in the River of Smoke. Bahram transports his opium in the Anahita, a ship built in Bombay by Parsi ship-builders, which Ghosh tells us is a sleek and elegant three-master that regularly outruns the swiftest British and American made opium carriers. Bahram lives life King-size. He eats well, dresses well and can claim to have met Emperor Napoleon along with his Armenian friend Zadig, while Napoleon was imprisoned by the British at St. Helena. Yes, Ghosh takes his readers to St. Helena and the meeting with the Emperor. And unlike other Indians in Canton who carve for Indian food and make a bee-line to Asha-didi’s boat for some curry, Bahram Modi or Barrie Moddie as the Westerners call him, is shown to enjoy all the local delicacies including sugar-cane sweetened caterpillars.

Bahram makes it to the Committee, the Chambers of Commerce which represents Western merchants in Canton, the only Indian merchant on it. The Western traders who occupy Fanqui town are a colourful lot, dancing with each other and many of them have a close male Friend since western women aren’t allowed into Canton. When they aren’t eating or drinking or dancing, they invoke the principles of free trade to fight the mandarins who try to keep opium out of China. The fact that opium can’t be sold in Britain cut does cut much ice with the merchants who refuse to comply with Chinese laws since “it has been the custom for Fanqui town to govern itself”. Bahram is very much in tune with the Western merchants, though he is man with a heart and does feel guilty about what he does.

At one point, we hear Bahram crib about how India’s ship-building industry was all set to overtake the British, but was then destroyed by the British through protectionist laws. Ghosh doesn’t elaborate on this point and though it makes sense to avoid even more digressions, I was a bit disappointed. It is well-known that India’s textile industry was destroyed by the British who imposed high tariffs on clothes manufactured in India and dumped in India relatively cheap textiles produced by British mills. However, can the same be said for India’s shipping industry which never really made the transition from wooden sailing vessels to iron-clads powered by steam?

In case, you wondered about the name, the River is the Pearl River, which runs through Canton and the Smoke comes from the opium (I guess). Towards the end of the novel when Commissioner Lin confiscates all the opium held in stock by the foreign merchants in Canton, I expected him to burn them and create smoke, but no, he instead has the crates opened, all 20,381 crates worth many hundreds of tons of silver Ghosh tells us, the balls of opium broken, mixed with salt and lime and thrown into water filled trenches, from where they will mix with the waters of the Pearl River. There is no smoke and in case you are worried about the pollution, Commissioner Lin has written “a poem, a prayer addressed to the God of the Sea asking that all the animals of the water be protected from the poison that will soon be pouring in.”

What I liked most about the River of Smoke is its clutter. What I didn’t like most about the River of Smoke is also the clutter. In addition to the Anahita, the River of Smoke has another ship, the Redruth which carries a botanist named Fitcher collecting specimens of flowers and plants from Cornwall to Canton. Quite a bit of space is devoted to Fitcher and those around him who spend all their time collecting plant specimens or paintings of plants. Other than Fitcher and the painters, there are a number of characters who are not guilty of the opium trade, but are around anyways. Especially since many of the local Chinese use English names, after a while I got really mixed up about who’s who. A list of characters at the end (or beginning) of the book would have definitely helped.

Ghosh has tried desperately to link the River of Smoke to the Sea of Poppies, but I just couldn’t see the point in starting the novel in a wind-swept corner of Mauritius and then taking us to Canton, where the book stays till the very end of this 550 page tome, when we go back to Mauritius for the last few pages. In the Sea of Poppies, we saw British agents force Indian farmers in the Gangetic plains to grow opium to the exclusion of all other crops, and buy it from them at very cheap rates. However, the opium which Bahram transports to Canton on the Anahita is not opium from Bengal, but freely grown opium from the Malwa which was then ruled by Maratha states such as the Scindias and the Holkars, subject to British suzerainty. It makes sense in a way, since with the exception of a few Bagdadi Jews such as David Sassoon, the Parsees were the most prominent among Indian opium merchants. It wouldn’t have made sense to have Bahram transport Bengal opium, unless he was based in Kolkata and the Parsees trading in opium were all based in Bombay, weren’t they?

I liked the River of Smoke more than the Sea of Poppies which I thought had an unrealistic ending. I found the last hundred pages of River of Smoke to be especially gripping as the tense standoff between Western merchants and the Chinese mandarins went on. However, the River of Smoke ends on a rather tame note. Nevertheless, I look forward to reading the concluding book in this trilogy.

Should NATO Assist The Libyan Rebels Capture Sirte?

2011-09-20T16:11:00.004+01:00

Sirte is one of the last enclaves in Libya still held by Gaddafi loyalists. A coastal town which is also Gaddafi’s birthplace, Sirte is full of Gaddafi loyalists and the National Transitional Council doesn’t have any supporters over there. Defended by the remnants of the Libyan army and possibly some mercenaries, Sirte has been putting up a tough fight and the untrained TNC militias have been taking huge casualties. As usual, NATO’s war planes have been bombing targets in Sirte. Is NATO justified in bombing Sirte when the town is overwhelmingly pro- Gaddafi?

In March this year, I had pleaded that the US and NATO ought to support the Libyan rebels who had risen up following the Arab spring and were in danger of being wiped out by well-trained Libyan government forces.

Now, the shoe is on the other foot and the TNC rebels are fighting to capture a town whose populace wants to be with Gaddafi. I don’t blame the rebels for wanting to have the whole of Libya under their control. However, should NATO continue to interfere in this war?

There is no guarantee that the NTC rebels will be better human beings than Gaddafi’s thugs. There are already credible reports of large scale violence against black Africans living in Libya on the ground that many mercenaries from black Africa are fighting for Gaddafi.

If NATO stops supporting the NTC, it is very likely to prolong the fighting and agony. So, NATO should continue to support the NTC. However, NATO should also insist that the NTC try and reach a settlement which will see Gaddafi leave Libya, but will guarantee autonomy and respect for towns like Sirte and Bani Wadi. Also, the rebels must be forced to agree to not to carry out reprisal attacks against Gaddafi’s supporters after Gaddafi’s exit.

Book Review: “The Secret Of The Nagas” by Amish Tripathi

2011-09-16T06:43:00.016+01:00

The sequel to The Immortals of Meluha was released a few weeks ago. In the The Immortals of Meluha, the Nagas had been cast as an evil race, one which helped the bad Chandravanshis carry out terrorist attacks in Meluha. However, Tripathi had also shown the Nagas in a good light in one instance where a Naga terrorist contingent rescues a woman from the jaws of a crocodile. Since the sequel is called The Secret Of The Nagas, I did expect an about-turn on the Nagas and I was not disappointed. The Nagas aren’t evil. In fact, they are downright friendly, helpful and even risk their necks to save people from trouble. We are shown a bunch of Nagas, the same people who carried out terrorist attacks in Meluha, who have now come to Swadweep following Shiva and Sati, take on a group of Magadhan soldiers who are trying to snatch a tribal child from its mother so that the child can be used as a bull race jockey. Yes, ‘bull race’ and not ‘camel race’, in case you wondered.

Shiva is on a quest to avenge the murder of Brahaspati, the Chief Scientist of Meluha, whom he had come to accept as his blood brother. He is sure that the Nagas are to blame for his death. The quest to find the Nagas and make them pay takes him to various parts of Swadweep which is actually a confederation of kingdoms, the richest and the most powerful of which is Branga. Yes, Branga with an ‘r’ and not ‘Banga’ or ‘Bengal’. The Brangas are shown to be rich, technologically advanced and nasty – they actually kill a peacock which triggers a riot, but then Tripathi does his usual above-turn and it seems that the Brangas are suffering from a plague in their own land and peacock blood, when mixed with a paste provided by the Nagas, can save children’s lives. Branga pays tribute to Ayodhya just to get some privacy!

There are too many about-turns in the book and after a while, you sort of start expecting Tripathi to go back on everything he says. Parshuram the bandit, who once beheaded his mother, isn’t what he appears to be. Plus he had a very good reason for beheading his mother. Even though Mount Mandar has been destroyed, the Meluhans do have a backup factory for the production of Somras. Anandamayi, the Chandravanshi princess, had seemed to be a vamp, but then she starts showing character and intelligence and actually wins over Parvateshwar, who had taken a vow of celibacy almost two hundred years ago! I wasn’t particularly surprised when I found out that Sati is related to the Nagas and finally, when towards the end someone who until them had seemed to be irreproachable and above suspicion falls to the dirt, I wasn’t particularly surprised. Do please read this book to find out more.

Tripathi continues to show the people of Sapt Sindhu to be technologically advanced. The Brangas’ ship-building skills are exceptional and the locks which the Brangas have built on the Ganges can beat the best in today’s world. Temples seem to work as transmitters, sending out radio waves which travel at the speed of thought. No, they are thoughts and not radio waves. Actually, I can’t explain this properly and will leave it to you to read the book and find out. Tripathi also elaborates on the competitive exams which allow anyone to become a Brahmin. Now it turns out that even non-Brahmins can take a competitive exam and become a Vasudev (a temple priest).

Tripathi’s language has not improved or changed much in The Secret of The Nagas. There is abundant use of words such as a ‘brutal’ and ‘vicious’. For example, while describing the battle of Madhumati between Shiva’s gang and Bandit Parshuram’s thugs, we read that ‘he clearly wanted brutal close combat’; ‘Parshuram charged. Followed by his vicious horde’; ‘....brought his battleaxe up in a brutal swing’; ‘The formidable axe severed through a part of the hide covered bronze shield’; ‘Shiva pirouetted smartly to avoid a vicious stab from one of the bandits......’ If one got a rupee every time Shiva pirouetted smartly to avoid a stab or a blow, or someone stabbed brutally or viciously, one would read The Secret of the Nagas for free! I exaggerate a little bit, but not much.

Just as for The Immortals of Meluha, reconciling oneself to and accepting history as rewritten by Tripathi, is key to enjoying The Secret of The Nagas. With his second book, which is as good or rather, maintains the same standards as The Immortals of Meluha, I would say that Tripathi has established himself as a bestselling author who can write in English and still connect with the common man, one as good as Chetan Bhagat.

Book Review: “The Immortals of Meluha” by Amish Tripathi

2011-09-13T02:12:00.019+01:00

A story set in 1900 BC which revolves around Lord Shiva wouldn’t be my usual cup of tea. I bought the The Immortals of Meluha solely because it’s been on the bestsellers chart for so long and I was curious to know why.

I don’t claim to be an expert either on Indian history or India’s epics and myths, but I have a basic idea of all of these. None of this helped while me reading the The Immortals of Meluha which re-writes India's ancient history in a very innovative manner. To start with, Lord Shiva, the hero of the novel, is shown to be a marijuana smoking immigrant from Tibet and an excellent fighter to boot. Meluha, the land of the Suryavanshi people, sends a team of soldiers to persuade Shiva and his tribe, the Gunas, to move to Meluha. Why do they do so? Because they are looking for a savior and Shiva with his blue throat is the Neelkanth. Why does the almost-perfect Meluha need a savior? Because it faces a threat from the lazy and evil Chandravanshi people, who occupy the neighbouring country Swadweep. The Swadweepans are aided by the evil Nagas.

Tripathi’s creation Meluha covers the entire North-West of the Indian subcontinent, stretching from Gujarat in the South to Kashmir and Afghanistan in the North, Punjab in the East and Sindh in the West. Swadweep is composed of the North East, with Bengal, Assam and most of the Gangetic plain. In the Immortals of Meluha, one keeps meeting people and places that sound familiar. There’s a famous city in Meluha called Harriyappa and another called Mohan Jo Daro, on the banks of the mighty Indus. Mohan Jo Daro apparently means “Platform of Mohan”, and is named after the great philosopher-priest Lord Mohan.

Tripathi tells us that Lord Manu is considered to be the progenitor of civilisation by all the people of “India”. Yes, Tripathi frequently uses the word “India” for the land called Sapt Sindhu, which holds Meluha and Swadweep. Apparently Lord Manu lived 8500 years before the story’s timeline (1900 BC). He was a prince in a land south of the Narmada, called “Sangamtamil.” We are told that Sangamtamil was the richest and most powerful country in the world. Lord Manu’s family, the Pandyas, had ruled that land for many generations. By Lord Manu’s time, the Kings of Sangamtamil had lost their old code of honour. 'Having fallen on corrupt ways, they spent their days in the pleasures of their fabulous wealth rather than being focussed on their duties and their spiritual life. Then a terrible calamity occurred. The seas rose and destroyed their entire civilisation.' Lord Manu had expected the calamity and he led a few followers to the northern higher lands in a fleet of ships. After reaching safety, Lord Many gave up his princely robes and became a priest. Tripathi tells us that the term for priests in India, “pandit”, is a derivation of Lord Manu’s family name “Pandya”! As a result of the flooding which destroyed Sangamtamil, various minor streams north of the Narmada became massive rivers – namely the Indus, Saraswati, Yamuna, Ganga, Sarayu and Brahmaputra. Lord Manu forbid anyone from going south of the Narmada where, at the time of this story, only the evil Nagas live. The land north of the Narmada came to be called Sapt Sindhu (since it had seven rivers).

Nagas, we are told by Tripathi, are a cursed people born with hideous deformities because of the sins of their previous births. Deformities like extra hands or horribly misshapen faces. They have tremendous strength and skills which makes them useful fighters. They are not allowed to live in Sapt Sindhu.

Many, many centuries before Shiva arrived on the scene, when Lord Brahma was in charge of affairs, people could become Brahmins only through a competitive examination process. Later caste became rigid and hereditary. It was Lord Ram who straightened things out. He introduced the Maika system, which reminded me of Plato’s proposals (never implemented) regarding communal living where children are to be brought up in common nurseries. Under the Maika system, all pregnant Meluhan women must travel to a camp when they are ready to deliver babies. Children are brought up in the Maika without knowing who their parents are. At the age of 15, a comprehensive exam is held, on the basis of which castes are allocated. After such allocation, there is one more year of training, this time, caste specific. Children are then adopted by parents from the caste allocated to them at the Maika. We get to know that under this fantastic system, over time, the percentage of high castes actually went up. At the time of this story, the Maika system continues to flourish, with the only difference being that the rulers and nobles have stopped putting their children in the Maika. In addition to the Maika, Lord Ram also created the Rajya Sabha, the ruling council, consisting of all Brahmins and Kshatriyas of a specific rank.

Meluhan women are free and have all rights. The prime minister of Meluha is a women, as is the doctor who tends to Shiva and his people as they arrive in Srinagar from Tibet. Sati seems to embody the ideal Meluhan woman, bold, fearless and beautiful. Some women even make it as Kshatriyas through the Maika system.

Meluha is so very technologically advanced. New immigrant Shiva is awestruck to find that its cities are built on elevated platforms. Shiva’s bathroom has ‘a magical device on the wall to increase the flow of water’ and a ‘strange cake like substance that the Meluhans said was a soap to rub the body clean.’ Meluhans live for hundreds of years, because they drink Somras, which is mass produced at a place called Mount Mandar. The Meluhans have numerous plantations for the Sanjeevani tree, since it is a crucial ingredient in Somras. Tripathi’s description of the manufacturing process for Somras reminded me of a nuclear reactor. We are told that manufacturing Somras generates a lot of heat and that a lot of water is needed during the processing to keep the mixture stable.

At Shiva’s wedding, water from the Saraswati is shown to be diverted into a channel which is shaped liked a Swastika. Filters inject a red dye into the water as it enters the channel and just as efficiently remove it as it flows out. We are told that Swastika means ‘that which is associated with well-being.’

First of a trilogy, The Immortals of Meluha’s plot is very basic and revolves around the tussle between Suryavanshis and Chandravanshis who are numerically superior to the Suravanshis and resort to cowardly “terrorist” attacks to weaken Meluha. Suryavanshis always fight by the rules. They would never stab in the back or strike below the knees. Somras, made available to all Meluhans, is what makes Meluha strong. The Chandravanshis too have knowledge of Somras, but they are unable to mass-produce it. Many decades before Shiva’s arrival, the Chandravanshis had managed to cause the Saraswati to dry up, leading to war, which the Meluhans had won. You see, the most important ingredient for Somras is the water from Saraswati, which comes from the confluence of two mighty rives, the Sutlej and the Yamuna. So the Chandravanshis diverted the course of the Yamuna (Tripathi doesn’t tell us how, but assures us that it can be done) so that instead of flowing south, it started flowing east to meet the Ganga. The Suryavanshis went to war with Swadweep over this and routed the Chandravanshis. Yamuna’s course was restored. The terms offered to Swadweep were liberal, too liberal, we are told. When Shiva arrives, the Saraswati is still drying up and the Meluhans aren’t sure why. Swadweepans outnumber Meluhans who keep having fewer and fewer children as their life-style keeps improving. Tripathi’s comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of the Suryavanshis and Chandravanshis, the liberal use of the word ‘terrorist’ and derision at the easy terms offered to Swadweep after its defeat, reminded me of the India and Pakistan rivalry and the Islamic terrorist angle.

Shiva irons out the few creases that exist in near-perfect Meluha. The Vikrama system, which even Lord Ram had endorsed, is the main object of Shiva’s fury. Vikramas are those who suffer ill-fate in life, such as having a still born baby. Sati is a vikrama and can’t attend yagnas. When she does, a nasty man called Tarak objects, forcing Sati to challenge him to an "agniparksha", which merely means a duel within a ring of fire, to be fought till one fighter dies. Does Sati survive her agniparisksha? Do read this book to find out.

Tripathi’s descriptions of the various fights Shiva gets embroiled in are good, but not that good. Almost all of them take place when Chandravanshis launch cowardly terrorist attacks with the help of Nagas. After an explosion destroys Mount Mandar (the place where Somras is mass manufactured), the Suryavanshis declare war on Swadweep. Swadweep has a large army which is a million strong, though many of its soldiers are conscripted. The Meluhan army is only a hundred thousand strong, but it is fully professional and Kshyatriya to the last volunteer. Further, Meluha’s advanced war machines cannot be taken across the rugged border. Shiva suggests new tactics and weapons. The first is a human ram, composed of men forming a tortoise like shell using their shields. This one’s taken straight from the Roman army’s field manual or maybe the Romans who came later copied it from Meluha. Then Shiva designs the trishul, which Tripathi tells us has the effect of three spears. War elephants are ruled out as being too unruly – you never know whether they will charge forwards or backwards. And finally Shiva comes up with a brilliant idea – archers! Archers who can rain a shower of arrows on the enemy! The Meluhans had apparently stopped using bows and arrows as they developed more advanced technology, but they see merit in Shiva’s idea, since they cannot take their long range catapults to Swadweep.

Shiva allows a Vikrama called Drapaku (who used to be a highly decorated soldier before bad-luck made him a Vikrama) to form a contingent of Vikrama soldiers to fight the Chandravanshis. Not everyone is happy, but Shiva’s order has to be obeyed. Once the battle beings, Meluhan soldiers are about to be caught in a pincer between two wings of the numerically superior Swadweepans. A battle akin to that at Thermopylae takes place Drapaku marches off with 5000 men who then hold the Chandravanshis off in a narrow defile. Most of the 5000 men die.

Shiva is not shown to have any supernatural powers, through towards the end one sees him deflect arrows with his sword. For the main battle with the Chandravanshis, Shiva has the Meluhan army arranged in a bow formation. Before the battle begins, Shiva explains to the already-egalitarian Suryavanshi soldiers that 'Har Har Mahadev' means each and every Suryavanshi is a Mahadev. This war cry further energizes the Suryavanshis who destroy the Swadweepans and sweep into Ayodhya, their capital city.

I wasn’t too impressed with Tripathi’s story-telling style, which I thought dragged a bit at times. However, after the march into Ayodhya, I changed my mind. No, it was not just the sudden arrival of the Swadweepan princess Anandmayi who is beautiful, raunchily dressed and is so very different from Meluhan women in that she is so politically incorrect. Do read this book, which suddenly became much more interesting at this point, to find out more.

Tripathi uses modern day terminology while telling us his tale. For example, immigrants (such as Shiva who arrived from Tibet) are taken to a “Foreigners Office” where they are met by an “Immigration Executive” who tells them that he is to be a ‘single point of contact for all issues while you are here.’ The immigrants are kept in “quarantine”, just in case they are carrying something infectious. The doctor who examines them is a great believer in the “field-work experience programme.” Much later, we see Shiva having a "breakfast meeting" with the ruler of Meluha. At one place, a soldier is address as "private" which made me wonder if I was reading a war novel with American GIs in it.

At times, Tripathi’s modern lingo doesn’t gel with the story, which also has its share of Sanskrit. When Shiva woos Sati we hear him think ‘Say yes, dammit!’ Later when Shiva is puzzled by Sati’s reactions, he thinks ‘what the hell is going on.’ Later Shiva thinks ‘he had to impress her.’ I tried to compare the Immortals of Meluha with Ashok Banker's Ramayana series, but stopped. Banker's Ramayana series transports you to the time when Lord Ram lived. The Immortals of Meluha is set in today's world and the ambience is not very different from that of a college cultural festival.

Immortals of Meluha is not the first novel to use modern day terminology to narrate an ancient tale. Setven Pressfield’s The Afghan Campaign did the same for Alexander the Great’s campaign in the land now called Afghanistan. However, I didn’t find Tripathi to be half as good as Pressfield.

In order to enjoy Immortals of Meluha, one has to accept Tripathi’s rewriting of history Every fiction writer has the licence to do what Tripathi has done. However, some of Tripathi’s statements in the foreword to the book made me wonder if Tripathi has approached this book strictly as a work of fiction. Tripathi asks us, ‘What if Lord Shiva was not a figment of a rich imagination, but a person of flesh and blood? Like you and me. A man who rose to become godlike because of his karma. That is the premise of the Shiva Trilogy, which interprets the rich mythological heritage of ancient India, blending fiction with historical fact. This work is therefore a tribute to Lord Shiva and the lesson that his life teaches us.’ I’ll say no more, but will leave it to you to judge for yourself.

Tripathi won’t be the first (or last) author to attempt rewriting history. A couple of years ago, I read the first four books of quintet by the famous secular/left wing writer cum activist Tariq Ali who is based in the UK. All four books sought to tell the story of how Islamic Empires rose and fell in a non-Eurocentric manner. The first one, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, is set in Granada after the Re-Conquest by Ferdinand and Isabella. The Book of Saladin is about, well, Saladdin, and is narrated by Ibn Yakub, a Jewish scribe retained by Saladin to pen his memoirs. The Stone Woman, the third book in Ali’s Islam Quintet, is set at the turn of the twentieth century as the six hundred year old Ottoman Empire slowly flickers out. Tariq Ali’s fourth novel The Sultan of Palermo revolves around the world renowned cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi who lived in the twelfth century and served the Norman King of Sicily, Roger II. All these books are fictionalised history. In The Book of Saladin, we are introduced to two crusaders, who did exist. Ali tells us that one of them attacked Mecca and desecrated it, surely a very serious charge. At one point, crusaders did harass pilgrims to Mecca, but to say a crusader attacked and desecrated Mecca is too serious a charge. Why does Ali get carried away so much? I don’t know. Maybe he felt that making crusaders look more evil and ruthless than they were would help negate the bias against Muslims in today's West.

I got the feeling that Tripathi has written India’s history, the way he would like it to have been – where there were no migrating Aryans fighting with the Dravidians, one which gives all Indians a shared and common heritage, which every modern-day Indian can be proud of. This isn’t a bad ambition, but then why didn’t Tripathi give the evil, deformed and misshapen Nagas some other name?

The second book in this trilogy has been released and I have just placed an order for it. There are number of reasons why I want to read it. You see, it is not really clear why a small contingent of Nagas and Chandravanshis have been attacking targets in Meluha. Was it simply to cause terror or were they trying to abduct someone? Also, it is possible that the explosion at Mount Mandar was the result of an accident or at the very least was not orchestrated by the ruler of Swadweep. Also, are the Chandravanshis as evil as they were initially made out to be? True, they are not as organised as the Meluhans, and each Chandravanshi is an individual, very different from each other, unlike the Meluhans who all seem to think alike. And finally, are the Nagas really that evil? We did see a group of Nagas rescue a woman from the jaws of a crocodile, even as they wrought mayhem in Meluha. Maybe there is something more to the Nagas than meets the eye.

On the whole, I would say that Tripathi is a good story teller, on par with someone like Chetan Bhagat and just like Bhagat, his stories would be even better if the narration could be improved.

Desertions: A Problem For The Afghan Army, But Not For The Taliban

2011-09-07T14:09:00.001+01:00

Desertions from the Afghan National Army which had hit a high of 35% at one time are likely to be around 24% for 2011. In other words, one in four Afghan soldiers will defect this year. And this is the army which will take on the Taliban when the Americans leave! If I were Karzai, I’d book that one-way ticket to New York or London or any other country that will take him in, right away.

Various reasons have been cited for this rate of attrition. Apparently, the most important is a long-standing Afghan policy that prohibits punishment of deserters. I wonder what the Taliban does with its deserters. Other reasons include poor living conditions, commanders who do not allow a regular vacation schedule and poor leadership.

Maybe it is time the Coalition acknowledged that Afghans are yet to accept the idea of a united Afghanistan or a common army for all tribes. Maybe it is time to examine the option of handing over power to local warlords (choose the most liberal ones available), disband the ANA and leave as soon as possible. I mean, there’s precious little to be gained by staying on.

Is Israel Running Out Of Local Friends?

2011-09-06T01:32:00.005+01:00

Ever since the storming of the Mavi Marmara by Israeli forces which led to the deaths of nine Turkish nationals, Turkish-Israeli have deteriorated. They hit a nadir last week as Turkey suspended all military ties with Israel and also expelled Israel’s ambassador from Turkey. Turkey is the only Muslim majority nation which had military ties with Israel, which wasn’t all that surprising since Turkey is a part of NATO and until recently, the Turkish military called the shots. An Israeli apology would have avoided the crisis and everyone wonders why Israel is willing to lose the only ally it has in the region.

Reputed Turkish journalist Omer Taspinar tells us that “According to the strategic assessment in Israel, it seemed that the relationship with Turkey was broken beyond repair. An apology would have allowed Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to declare victory without really changing the structural flaws that have emerged in the bilateral partnership since 2006. The fact that Turkey was not only demanding an apology and compensation but also an end to the embargo over Gaza is very telling for the Israelis. This showed that normalization with Turkey was almost impossible as long as the Turkish government indexed its relations with Tel Aviv not just to bilateral factors but also to the Palestinian question.”

Reputed Israeli journalist Shmuel Rosner has posted a rejoinder. In a sense, Rosner agrees with Taspinar.

Egypt and Turkey were Israel’s closest friends in the region. After Mubarak fell, Egypt changes course and opened the crossings at Gaza. Of course, Israel has informal understandings with all Sunni monarchies in the middle-east, including Saudi Arabia, but the writing’s now on the wall. As democracy spreads in the middle-east, governments previously friendly with Israel are forced to become aggressive and demand a solution to the Palestinian question. Clearly, Israel is not willing to back down from its high horse, but its no-compromise attitude is not going to take it far in the current political climate.

Book Review: “Last Man in Tower” by Aravind Adiga

2011-09-05T01:06:00.008+01:00

Actually, it ought to have been Tower ‘A’. You see, the Vishram society has two towers, A and B, and considering Adiga’s love for detail, I’m surprised Adiga didn’t specify the tower in his title. It’s in Tower A that almost all the action takes place and Masterji, as retired school teacher Yogesh Murthy’s neighbours address him, makes his last stand.

I hadn’t liked Adiga’s first novel The White Tiger all that much. What I didn’t like about it was the very idea that Balram Halwai, a semi-educated, self-made man and a murderer would write a series of letters to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabao, cribbing about India. Last Man in Tower is a better book. Much, much better. The prose is just as good and the story is a lot more interesting with a half-decent plot. I wouldn’t call the plot very original. In these days of globalisation, there are so many stories of men and women who refuse to be evicted, to make way for a shining glass and steel builing or a factory. However, Adiga takes this very basic plot much beyond a mere last stand.

Adiga loves details. He doesn’t give his reader any choice in this matter. Anyone who manages to complete the Last Man in Tower cannot help but acquire a wealth of knowledge about Mumbai and its building societies. However, Adiga’s prose and story-telling ability takes Last Man in Tower to a higher plane. Consider this:

'South Mumbai has the Victoria Terminus and the Municipal Building, but the suburbs built later, have their own Gothic style: for every evening by six, pillars of hydro-benzene and sulphur dioxide rise high up from the roads, flying buttresses of nitrous dioxide join each other, swirls of unburnt kerosene, mixed illegally into the diesel, cackle like gargoyles, and a great roof of carbon monoxide closes over the structure. And this Cathedral of particulate matter rises over every red light, every bridge and every tunnel during rush hour.'

Adiga gets you to meet his characters up and close, front and back, inside and outside, from above, helicopter view as well as from a hovercraft, and finally from below, using one of those mirrors stuck at the end of a long stick used to check under cars for bombs. Adiga shoves his characters into your face and forces you to swallow. At times, you wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to let you observe the character from some distance and maybe get up close just once and walk away rather than force you into a close hug. Nevertheless, you get to know each of the major characters and some of the minor ones as well. Last Man in Tower is a study in human nature and since it revolves around middle, middle-class Mumbaikars living in a dilapidated building being offered an extraordinary sum of money (250% of the market value) to move out of their flats to make way for a very posh building, you end up with a fascinating insight into how the human mind works when confronted with forces of greed, avarice and ego. ‘You should always be thinking, what does he have that I don’t have? That way you go up in life. You understand me?’ Mr. Shah advises a young lad who has recently arrived in Mumbai.

Yogesh Murthy, aka Masterji initially decides to not move out mainly because his closest friends in Tower A, the Pintos, do not want to leave. Mrs. Pinto is blind and she is petrified at the idea of having to leave familiar surroundings and go elsewhere. Masterji’s opposition to the exodus soon turns into something else, in the face of popular support for the scheme and a demand from people who respected him till then, that he too agree to move out.

The occupants of Tower A are less well-off than those in Tower B. Flats in Tower B are larger and better maintained and of course they are to be paid more than those in Tower A. However, it is in Tower A that Mr. Shah’s offer to pay 19,000 rupees per square foot arouses greater excitement. They all need the money for various things and since they are being paid so much more above market value, they will have enough to buy a decent house and a handsome amount leftover to pay for their dreams. The only catch is that the acceptance of the offer has to be unanimous. If even one individual objects, the generous offer made by the Confidence Group will not translate into money.

Why does Masterji keep objecting even after the Pintos give in? Even after handbills denouncing him make an appearance and those who respected him till then start boycotting him? Masterji has old students who are now in eminent positions who will fight for him. Or will they? Did they really like him all that much or did they merely respect him? After all, even his only son does not seem to like him much. The bait dangled by Mr. Shah and his left-hand man Shanmugham are so tantalising that Masterji’s neighbours become vicious in their campaign to get him to agree.

What can make a man change his mind and agree to move away from memories of his wife who died a year ago? A job-less teenager with a hockey stick and some empty threats? A man sitting on the footpath outside, merely keeping a watch on all his movements? Human shit smeared on the outside of the front door?

Will Masterji give in or will he force Mr. Shah to go away? Masterji is not fighting for more money. He is only, to quote a minor character in this novel, an American journalist with a goatee living in Mumbai, ‘making a statement against unplanned development’. Adiga keeps you guessing till the end.

Adiga likes to break down stereotypes, at the risk of eating into his realistic capital. Mr. Shah, the villain of the book, is shown to enjoy not only his booze, as many Gujarati businessmen in Mumbai do, he also enjoys fish and prawns and crabs, very unlike the average Gujarati businessman. We see him entertain one of the inhabitants of Tower A at a Mangalorean sea-food joint at Juhu (which incidentally doesn’t have many places serving non-vegetarian food since it is a Gujarati locality). We also see him serve meat and fish and liquor at his Malabar Hill home, something unthinkable for a Gujarati, who are by and large, vegetarians. One of Mr. Shah’s competitors is one Mr. J. J. Chacko. I haven’t heard of any Keralites among the leading builders in Mumbai, but then, I don’t claim to be an expert.

There was only one detail, one tiny detail in the whole 419 page book which I thought was outright wrong. Since Adiga is a stickler for detail, this error sort of stands out. Mr. Puri, an accountant, commutes from Tower A to Nariman Point. Tower A is in Vakola and Adiga tells us that Mr. Puri’s commute involved – ‘auto, train, change of train at Dadar and then a shared taxi from Victoria Terminus to Nariman Point, from where he would call Ramu, to enquire about the state of the Friendly Duck’s health that day.’ My question is, if Nariman Point is the final destination, the change at Dadar should be to the Western Line which gets one to Churchgate. Nariman Point is much closer to Churchgate than to Victoria Terminus. Also, wouldn’t it make better sense for Mr. Puri to get to Santa Cruz by auto and take the Western Line to begin with, and avoid the need to change at Dadar? I mean, this error is inexplicable for an author who has dedicated this book to (I’m not making this one up) “my fellow commuters on the Santa Cruz-Churchgate local line”. I sort of take this omission personally since I commute on the Western Line daily to get to work at Nariman Point.

I really liked Last Man in Tower though I can’t say I enjoyed it. It is not a book meant to be enjoyed, though it is actually unputdownable. I wouldn’t be surprised if it wins a Booker. I mean, this one’s twice as good as The White Tiger.

In case you want to sample Adiga’s prose, some of his short stories can be found online.

Book Review: "The Bad Boy’s Guide To The Good Indian Girl", by Annie Zaidi and Smriti Ravindra

2011-08-31T07:25:00.011+01:00

Everyone knows that girls are of two types, good and bad. Boys too can be good and bad, but they can take a number of shades in between, especially after they become older. This is true in most parts of the world, but all the more so in India where with the “Good Girl” tag is especially sought after.

Annie Zaidi and Smriti Ravindra have come up with a book which has two titles. The official one, “The Bad Boy’s Guide To The Good Indian Girl” doesn’t make too much sense except from the marketing point of view. The alternative title suggested on the back and inside first page of the book, “The Good Indian Girl’s Guide To Living, Loving and Having Fun”, which I assume was the authors’ choice, is much more to the point. I can actually envisage the conversation that must have taken place between Zubaan’s marketing team and Zaidi and Ravindra. ‘But this book has nothing to do with bad boys. In fact, there aren’t any bad boys in the book.’ Never mind’, the marketers tell Zaidi and Ravindra, ‘what do you know about selling books in the tough Indian market? Do you want your book to sell or not?’ It’s obvious that the marketers won, but Zaidi and Ravindra ought to be congratulated for making sure a more relevant name appears on the (back) cover.

If I were asked to name this book, I would have called it “Splendid Stories of Good Indian Girls, Which Can Be Enjoyed By All.” And man, what classy stories they are. Some of them are not more than two pages long and some run to ten pages or more. Each of them is about an Indian girl, mostly good, a few bad and many who are not so good, but manage to get away with it. Zaidi and Ravindra write in excellent unobtrusive prose which is akin to high quality corn flour used in good chicken soup. You don’t really get to taste the corn flour and don’t even think of it much as you gulp down the soup, but without the quality corn flour, the soup wouldn’t be half as enjoyable. Another very good thing about the prose is that though jointly written, it is seamless. If the joint authorship hadn’t been proclaimed on the cover, I would have thought the entire collection was written by a single very good writer.

The stories are interwoven and one gets to meet the characters again as they get older, get married and get on with life. To begin with, in the first few stories, the good girls take a few risks (while having harmless fun), but don’t tarnish their good reputation. Just as I started to wonder if all the stories would be about good girls staying good, one falls down and gets muddied. Soon, it happens again. The stories are mostly set in small town India where the concept of a good girl still strongly holds sway. Reading the stories, I could actually hear the quickening heartbeat and feel the sweaty palm as a good girl boldly spoke to a boy or accepted a lift in a car, almost breaking the rule, but not quite. Even though all stories are set in Northen Indian towns and cities, readers in other parts will have no trouble identifying their locales in these stories.

There were a few things I didn’t like so much about this book. After each story, one stumbles into a page or two (sometimes three) of commentary printed in italics. Some of the interjections in italics were as good as the stories and some served as good epilogues, but at times I found the commentaries to be killjoys, stating the obvious, sort of forcing the horse to drink, having lead it to the water. This book could have done without most of them. Another thing I didn’t like is that these stories have been written solely with the intention of showing the reader what makes a girl good, what society expects from good girls and what good girls can safely do to have fun. Therefore, though many characters in these interwoven stories appear again and again, one gets the feeling of not knowing them well. Almost as if one is given the topping from a chocolate cake and is not allowed to dig in beyond that.

On the whole, this is a wonderful book, one which I highly recommend.

Annie Zaidi is a Mumbai-based journalist whose columns appear in DNA. She also blogs at Known Turf. Smriti Ravindra nee Jaiswal (presumably) hails from Nepal, is a regular columnist for the Kathmandu Post and is currently based in the US.

Update: After I posted this review, Annie Zaidi contacted me by email and clarified that I was completely wrong about the title. The title “The Bad Boy’s Guide To The Good Indian Girl” was the authors' choice and after the publishers expressed reservations, Zaidi and Ravindra decided to add the alternative title, “The Good Indian Girl’s Guide To Living, Loving and Having Fun.” That's a lesson learned for me - to not to jump to conclusions.

Book Review: “Mota Seth” by M. Rishi Kumar

2011-08-24T01:10:00.008+01:00

One of the first things that strike you even before you cross the tenth page of Mota Seth is the refreshing enthusiasm and optimism of the protagonist Roshan Kumar. Roshan hails from a family which, from the various descriptions given to the reader, appears to be well-to-do, but is yet to produce a lawyer. Determined to be the first legal eagle from the House of Kumar, Roshan lands in gritty Mumbai from cozy Bengaluru (where he did his law degree) and starts working for Mistry & Mistry and Michael & Button, one of the leading law firms in Mumbai. Roshan’s attitude is not unlike that of a twelve year old boy-scout – very diligent, very trusting and highly optimistic. Almost exactly when one reaches the middle of the book, one hears Roshan tell his colleagues at Mistry and Mistry of his ambition to make it as a partner. By this time, Roshan has completed more than a year at the firm. ‘Are you mad? they ask him. The reasons rattled out by his colleagues as to why Roshan will not make Partner - nepotism, unwillingness to make changes etc. – hit him hard. Roshan is suddenly devoid of all enthusiasm for working at Mistry and Mistry!

The blurb tells us that Mota Seth is ‘a tale of Roshan Kumar’s journey to become a Mota Seth – Senior Partner of a law firm. It depicts a true story (albeit fictionalised) of the aspirations of a novice in the field of law to become a Senior Partner in a prestigious law firm. Unlike others Roshan has no godfather in the profession.’ The blurb goes on to say that 'Roshan’s experiences are often derived from the author’s own experiences while he was working in two of India’s finest law firms – Mulla & Mulla and Craigie Blunt & Caroe, Mumbai, which is one of the oldest and the largest law firms and AZB & Partners, Mumbai, the fastest growing law firm in India. In this tale the author has tried to amalgamate reality with the lives of several fictional and semi- fictional characters.’

Author Kumar has not made any great effort to disguise the names of his characters and those familiar with the leading corporate law firms and senior counsel in Mumbai will immediately recognise many of the firms and senior lawyers who find a place in Kumar’s tale. They are many, starting with firms like Mistry & Mistry and Michael & Button, where Roshan starts his life as a lawyer, the Chambers of Zeenath Tody where Roshan moves to after leaving Mistry & Mistry, Horniman & Gandhi, Tirothamdas, Fakirchand & Sheriff etc. and individuals like Zeenath Tody, Akash Ahuja (a lawyer who works for Horniman & Gandhi and goes trekking on weekends) and the like. One of the best things about Mota Seth is that it is, to a large extent, an authentic description of the life of a junior lawyer in one of Mumbai’s corporate law firms. Since Roshan works for the antique, old world (charm included) Mistry & Mistry (where clerks have unions and get pensions) as well the modern Chambers of Zeenath Tody, which later becomes ZAB & Partners, one gets to know both worlds.

Another very good thing about Mota Seth, especially for non-lawyers, is that many of the minutiae of legal jargon are explained. ‘What’s this Kacha Board, Sarvesh?’ ‘What does this GMS stand for Sarvesh?’ Questions such as these are asked by Roshan (in his usual boy-scout style) and patient answers are given by kind souls nearby.

If you thought Mota Seth was all about law and lawyers, you would be dead wrong. Roshan meets pretty damsel Shobana, shortly after he fights off a couple of drunks who attack him outside a pub. Rather, Shobana pulls up alongside him in a black Merc – yes, she is rich as well. Soon one finds Roshan making love to Shobana. They host a Holi party (bhang and all), go trekking with Roshan’s friends and soon it is time for Shobana to go off to Seattle. Roshan misses Shobana and takes to heavy drinking. His work suffers as a result. Do Roshan and Shobana get back together? Do read this book to find out.

Roshan does very well at the Chambers of Zeenath Tody, which later expands to become a partnership and is named ZAB & Partners. However, he isn’t too happy with certain things there and moves to Chennai where he joins the Chambers of Senior Advocate Anand Karkare. Once again, Roshan is found to be reliable and hardworking and good work flows his way. Old friends in Mumbai send him transactional work, which he takes on in addition to his court appearances. He starts making good money, as much as he made at ZAB & Partners. Finally, Roshan sets up his own law firm, in Chennai, which he calls the intellectual capital of India. I haven’t heard anyone else refer to Chennai thus, but a google search did lead me to this website which does.

‘A champagne coloured BMW series 7 pulls out of bungalow No. 204 opposite the Besant Nagar Beach in Chennai and wades into the city traffic on Sardar Patel Road. The occupant is wearing a grey pinstripe Versace suit, a crisp white shirt, a dark navy blue printed tie with Hugo Boss shoes and black Oakley shades. He is checking his email on his Blackberry while glancing at his Omega black dial chronograph, before making a call to his secretary to check his appointments for the day.’ No prizes for guessing who we are talking about. Yes, Roshan has arrived as a Mota Seth. His services are so much in demand that his former boss Zeenath Tody calls him up to request him to make time to meet a client since ‘the only lawyer who could save them was Roshan.’

There are a few things I didn’t like about Mota Seth. My most pressing grumble is that I expected a story where a lawyer without the right connections fights his way to the top of a prestigious law firm in Mumbai and becomes a Mota Seth. A law firm in Mumbai it had to be and it could not be any other city. After all, when Roshan asks in the beginning of the book ‘what does Mota Seth mean?’ in his innocent boy-scout style, he is told ‘Among the Solicitor fraternity in Mumbai, normally a senior partner is addressed as Mota Seth.’ I sort of felt cheated when it turns out that Roshan becomes a Mota Seth, albeit by setting up his own firm in Chennai. I doubt if a Partner in any Chennai law firm is called a Mota Seth. Also, Roshan Kumar is not a fighter, a quality one would expect in a Mota Seth. Articled clerks at Mistry and Mistry are entitled to take six months’ study leave to prepare for the Solicitors exams held by the Bombay Incorporated Law Society (a non-statutory body, more like a guild, a hangover from the British era where the three Presidency towns had Barristers and Solicitors. Currently Bombay is the only Presidency town which continues this tradition. To call oneself a Solicitor in Bombay, one needs to pass the very tough exams held by this society). More Catholic than the Pope, Roshan opts to take only three months off. When he flunks his ‘Sols’ for the first time, as many do, he doesn’t take them again. Kumar doesn’t tell us if Roshan messed up because he had taken only three months to prepare instead of the normal six months. Roshan runs away from Mistry & Mistry as soon as he finds out that he wouldn’t easily make Partner there. Roshan runs away from ZAB & Partners too, though ZAB & Partners is a firm which is shown to have a number of partners who rose up without godfathers or connections by sheer dint of their hard work, solely because he does not like the politics there. In the last twenty pages of the book, Roshan quits ZAB & Partners, moves to Chennai, works for Senior Advocate Karkare, makes a name for himself and sets up his own firm. Too easy and too fast, I thought, as if Kumar suddenly realised after 165 pages that Roshan was nowhere close to becoming a Mota Seth and he had to quickly do something about it.

Another big drawback in this book is that Kumar does not flesh out any of his characters other than Roshan. For example, there’s Bhawick who chews paan during office breaks and goes pub-hopping with his girlfriend in the evenings. Even Roshan Kumar as a character is not consistent. Most of the time, he is diligent, hardworking, sober and unquestioningly obedient, putting up with very, very late nights (which usually end at six in the morning) and still finds time to go jogging in the mornings. He too chews paan during office breaks – presumably to give Bhawick some company. Then he does a sudden flip-flop and one sees him getting drunk, making love and shirking work. The two facets of Roshan presented by Kumar just don’t gel.

Kumar writes in simple English, the sort used by the average Mumbaikar. At times, he switches from past tense to the present. Many of the phrases used are quaint and not necessarily grammatically correct – sentences like ‘keep a check on your wallet and the file’, ‘take Sarvesh with you and take an orientation of the High Court building,’ ‘nobody is a born learned’– but these only add to the ‘context’ and ‘character’ of the book as a whole. Kumar doesn’t hesitate to make his characters, especially Roshan, speak in Hindi (sans any translation in English), which in a way enhances the ‘atmosphere.’ There are a number of typographical errors and even more grammatical ones. However, for these, I’ll lay the blame at the door of the editors at Pustak Mahal, the publisher.

On the whole, a good book, one worth spending time and money (Rs. 125) on.

Libya – With A Few Misgivings And A Lot Of Optimism

2011-08-22T02:03:00.006+01:00

The rebels fighting Gaddafi’s forces are at the gates of Tripoli. They wouldn’t have got there if it hadn’t been for NATO’s air campaign which has continuously bombed and strafed Gaddafi’s forces since 19 March 2011. The million dollar question is, was that the right thing to have done? Should NATO have blasted open a path to Tripoli for the rebels? What do we know of these rebels? Who are they? What is their ideology?

Gaddafi, despite so many failings, was secular and kept the Al Qaeda wolf at bay. In many ways, he is very similar to the late Saddam Hussein. A dictator who had a love-hate (maybe hate-love-hate) relationship with the West, it had appeared till Jasmine revolutions started to sweep various North African and Middle-Eastern States early this year, that Libya and the West had kissed and made up. Past attempts by the US to remove Gaddafi were forgotten as Gaddafi’s son Saif al Islam Qaddafi returned from the London School of Economics with a plagiarised Ph.D and started to rebuild ties with the West. However, after Jasmine revolutions toppled governments in Egypt and Tunisia, restive Libyans threw their hats into the ring and forced the West to take a stand – to either support them or stand back and watch as ruthless Gaddafi’s forces annihilated them.

I feel that NATO’s decision to support the Libyan rebels was essentially a good one. And a correct one. To have done nothing would have invited accusations of not supporting the cause of democracy in North Africa. To not have escalated the bombing campaign would have resulted in the rebels being let down, after having their hopes up. Also, unlike Iraq, Libya does not have a huge Shia majority which could take the nation into an Iranian orbit or a strong Islamic fundamentalist movement which might drop Libya into Al Qaeda’s lap.

The latest reports say that Saif al Islam Qaddafi and another of Gaddafi’s sons, Saadi, have been captured by the rebels as they advance within 2 kilometers of Tripoli’s centre. Let’s hope the rebels who are poised to take Tripoli turn out to be good guys – people we can all live with.

“When Mira Went Forth And Multiplied” by Shinie Antony - Book Review

2011-08-16T06:29:00.003+01:00

What happens when "Bridget Jones’s Diary" is written in prose that is comparable to Catch 22’s? A little over three years ago, when I reviewed Antony’s short story collection “Séance on a Sunday Afternoon”, I had found it simple, stark, rapid and at times vulgar. In her latest work When Mira Went Forth And Multiplied, Antony’s prose has matured and mellowed like vintage wine. The sharpness of tongue, the extra-ordinary ability to appreciate minutiae, the quick turn of phrase not unlike an excellent swordsman flicking his wrist to score a direct hit, the astounding ability to mention unmentionables with a deadpan expression, they are all there, but in a much improved form.

When Mira Went Forth And Multiplied is chick-lit. Any doubt on that score is washed away shortly after the novel begins when Mira’s friend tells her ‘You know what’s sadder than saying I do to the wrong guy? Saying I don’t to the right. Bad girls are the new good girls, haven’t you heard?’

Just like Bridget Jones, Mira is also in search of man and suffering as she looks around. We are told in Antony’s inimitable style that, ‘she grew pale and uninteresting, ate poorly and ailed deep in her heart, her hymen alone healthy as a horse.’

When Mira prays, she asks, ‘Give me today my daily man.’ Or nightly. She wasn’t picky about the timing, Antony tells us.

When Mira finally has her affair, or rather a one-night stand, it is with much married Samundar Shah – Sam for short. Sam is henpecked and under pressure from various sides to have a baby with his wife Delta. When we hear Sam’s mother Leela-ben solicitously ask him ‘Is the baby juice going into her baby maker? we are left in no doubt that Leela-ben is worried that Sam and Delta haven’t got certain basics right.

Sam is not only henpecked, but is also a cuckold. His conversations with Delta are usually very entertaining.

‘Did you notice I’ve cut my hair shorter?

He smiled fondly. How could anyone cut their hair longer?

After a pause, she again turned to him with a determinedly zany smile, ‘Remember the first time you kissed me?’

‘Do you mean the first time we kissed or the first time I kissed you?’ Having had to take the lead in matters intimate from time immemorial with her, Sam always made it a point to record levels of participation.

‘What’s the difference?’ she asked losing some of the zany.

‘The first time we kissed, you kissed me,’ he pointed out triumphantly.’

After the one-night stand, Sam disappears and Mira pines for him, until she decides to take revenge. Mira’s actions result in Mira becoming very close to Delta and Leela-ben since they are all interested in Sam’s welfare. I would rather not say anything more and give away the plot, but do please read this fantastic book and find out how it all ends.

12 August, 6:30 p.m., Reliance TimeOut, Bandra West, Please Do Come

2011-08-10T08:50:00.002+01:00

My second novel (When The Snow Melts), a spy thriller, will be released in a few months from now. As a prelude to it, I am part of a panel which will discuss 'Nail-Biting Thrillers and High Brow Literature' at Reliance Time Out, Hill Road, Bandra West, Mumbai from 6:30 - 7:30 p.m. on 12 August. All are invited. Do come!

Extradite Shrien Dewani

2011-08-09T14:53:00.000+01:00

When it was reported that pretty young bride Anni Dewani had been murdered while on honeymoon in South Africa, I was still in the UK, busy winding up to return to India, after having been away for over 8 years. I remember the overwhelming feeling of sympathy I then had for the handsome groom Shrien Dewani, a man I could identify with and feel sorry for. A week or so later, the contrarian shocking reports started coming in. It was alleged by the South African police that the entire car-jacking was ‘fixed’ by Shrien who wanted his bride bumped off. I remember feeling shock and revulsion. How could a man, any man, let someone carry off his wife to be killed? My mind boggled at that very thought. However, once that idea had been floated, I could not dismiss it, though I did still think the chances were that Shrien was innocent. I mean, why would a wealthy Briton want to kill his wife? He could divorce her, if he wanted to, couldn’t he?

Shrien hired publicist Max Clifford to fight some of his battles. This left a very bad taste in the mouth. Why wouldn’t an innocent man boldly face a trial in a court of law? Granted South Africa might not have the same standards as the UK, it was still inconceivable that someone facing such charges wouldn’t want to clear his name at an open trial. Instead Shrien was doing his best to avoid his extradition. South African jails are a nightmare, his lawyers claimed. He would not receive a fair trial, they alleged. Handsome Shrien would be raped as soon as he sets foot inside a South African jail, his publicist trumpeted. The South African government’s case was not helped by its National Police Commissioner Bheki Cele calling Shrien a ‘monkey’.

Now the rumours say that Shrien is gay and was forced into this marriage. There are other stories that Shrien had paid sex with male prostitutes. His family forced him to marry Anni and would not have allowed him to divorce her. If true, it might show a motive for wanting to have his young bride killed.

Shrien is said to be suffering from acute stress and depression. He certainly looks like he is. But then, anyone in his position would be depressed and stressed, wouldn’t they?

The extradition hearings are still going on. Tomorrow, 10 August 2011, yet another hearing will take place. A decision on whether to extradite him to South Africa could be given tomorrow. However, it is likely that the extradition hearings could go on for many more weeks or even months.

I hope that Shrien is extradited to South Africa and given a fair trial. Anything short of that would be a travesty of justice. I mean, the British government has signed an extradition treaty with South Africa. If conditions in South African jails are so bad and no one gets a fair trial out there, would such a treaty have been signed? To say that Shrien should not even be extradited and put on trial in South Africa would be to question the UK-SA extradition treaty itself.

In light of the publicity this case has generated, I also hope that Shrien is not harmed while he is an under-trial in South Africa.

“The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” by Siddhartha Mukherjee – A Review

2011-08-03T06:25:00.004+01:00

The first sentence of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, makes you wonder for a moment if you are reading a detective novel or a crime thriller.

'In a damp fourteen-by-twenty foot laboratory in Boston on a December morning in 1947, a man named Sidney Farber waited impatiently for the arrival of a parcel from New York.'

No, Farber is not waiting for the delivery of a pistol fitted with a silencer. The parcel turns out hold a few vials of yellow crystalline chemical named aminopterin, shipped to Farber’s laboratory in the slim hope that it might halt the growth of leukemia in children. No wonder, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2011. Authored by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born doctor based in the United States, The Emperor of All Maladies tells the story of cancer from the time of the ancient Egyptians and Persians till the present, a gripping tale which makes the reader want someone somewhere in this world to find a cure for this malady which has befuddled physicians since time immemorial.

Mukherjee writes well. Very well. What could have been a boring narrative of banal events is transformed by Mukherjee into a series of exciting events that hold the reader’s attention. There are numerous stories of cancer patients and doctors who fight the good fight against this so-far-unconquered disease, each of which is interesting on its own. If the prologue starts with Carla Reed, a thirty-year old Kindergarten teacher from Ipswich, a mother of three who woke up with a headache, the book ends with Germaine who was hit with a rare type of gastrointestinal cancer, made a brilliant recovery and then suffered a relapse. Mukherjee does not tell us if Carla or Germaine made it, just as he does not tell us when he expects a cure to be discovered.

Cancer is not something new or modern. Our ancients knew of it. Atossa the Persian queen suffered from what was most probably breast cancer and had a slave excise her tumour. No, don’t worry, when Mukherjee describes the excision, it sounds a lot better than when you read it here.

Mukherjee’s book is descriptive. When Mukherjee is not describing an experiment or a victim’s pain, he is still describing something else. For example, when telling us about the commencement of a set of trials in a Swedish town, Mukherjee tell us:

‘Perched almost on the southern tip of the Swedish peninsula, Malmö is a bland, gray-blue industrial town set amid a featureless gray-blue landscape. The bare sprawling flatlands of Skane stretch out to its north and the waters of the Øresund strait roll to the south. Battered by a steep recession in the mid-1970s, the region had economically and demographically frozen for nearly two decades. Migration into and out of the city had shrunk to an astonishingly low 2 percent for nearly twenty years. Malmö had been in limbo with a captive cohort of men and women. It was the ideal place to run a difficult trial.’

The only flip side to this brilliant book which uses American spelling is that it is a bit too long. I mean, Mukherjee writes well and there isn’t a single anecdote which isn’t interesting, but after 300 pages, I realised that I still had 172 pages to go and almost buckled. I did carry on though and I am glad I did, but future readers should remember that they are signing up for a marathon when they start this book. A long and exciting marathon, which at times looks as if it will never end - just like the fight against cancer.

Getting Off A Virar Fast At Borivali

2011-08-01T07:22:00.003+01:00

A few months ago, I had written a short story called “Getting Off A Virar Fast At Borivali” and submitted it to the Urban Stories Competition 11 jointly run by Landmark and Grey Oak.

In early July, I found that my story had made it to a long list. Now I find that it has made it to the final short-list and will appear in an anthology (called Urban Shots Crossroads) in December 2011. Click on this link and see row 16 in the US Crossroads section for my name and the title.

Curfewed Night: By Basharat Peer – Book Review

2011-07-26T13:45:00.004+01:00

I had read this book immediately after it appeared it print in 2008. Recently I happened to re-read it and found that it has lost none of its authenticity or relevance. A work of non-fiction by Basharat Peer, a journalist who now lives in the US, Curfewed Night is the story of Kashmir, Peer’s Kashmir and, my, my, what a tale it is!

The first dozen odd pages tell us the story of Kashmir prior to commencement of the insurgency in January 1990. Peer’s prose is excellent and his description of life in Kashmir reminded me of a collection of Armenian short stories (“We Of The Mountains”) I had read many, many years ago. Life in the valley was simple, sweet and straight forward. It also reminded me of Kerala a little bit, what with farmers holding government jobs – Peer’s father is the headmaster of a government school and his father a civil servant – working nine to five and taking care of their fields and crops after office hours.

Until the troubles erupted in 1990, Peer tells us that Kashmiris weren’t not too political. They supported the Pakistani cricket team when it played India but otherwise, their political affiliation with either side was lukewarm. Even Peer, the son of a Kashmiri civil servant, cheered for Pakistan. Peer doesn’t explain why this should be so. No, Peer doesn’t question Kashmir’s accession to India – he merely tells us that when Pakistani tribesmen supported by the Pakistani army invaded Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh decided to join India and that Sheikh Abdullah, who was a friend of Nehru, supported the Maharaja.

In the beginning, Peer’s narrative is essentially what he himself saw in those turbulent days rather than a holistic one. Peer is very sympathetic to the Kashmiri freedom movement and dreams of joining the militants. Once again, there are no long drawn (ideological) explanations as to why Peer wants Kashmir to be independent rather than be a part of India. Peer tells us that the militants killed many Pandits and those who survived left the Valley. Many classrooms became half empty. Some of Peer’s friends went off to join the militants and never returned. Peer makes it clear that the Pandits’ departure made him sad, but his support for the militants doesn’t abate as a result.

The average Kashmiri’s support for the insurgency is shown to be tempered with pragmatism. Ordinary people do their best to dissuade militants from attacking convoys near their houses out of fear of having to bear the brunt of the army’s retaliation. Just as in Mirza Waheed’s “The Collaborator”, Peer too shows the Indian army and paramilitary forces as overwhelmingly strong and powerful. Peer doesn’t hesitate to tell us of casualties suffered by the militants, but is silent on the number of soldiers or paramilitary men killed. For example, Peer tells us how once JKLF militants attacked an Indian army convoy that passed by their village. All villagers fled to the neighbouring village before the attack began. No, no one even thought of warning the army, though, before fleeing, they did (unsuccessfully) plead with the militants to attack the convoy elsewhere. Peer and his family returned the next day and they found bullets inside their house. We are not told of the outcome of the attack on the convoy – most probably Peer thought it irrelevant to his story.

One of the best things about Peer’s tale is that he manages to bring out the human side of the militants’. Peer tells us how Asif, a militant, gave up fighting.

'One day our commander told us that we had to attack an army convoy. I picked up my Kalashnikov. We were about to leave and I began shivering. I was too scared and death seemed so real. I left soon after that. My commanders were kind enough to let me go.’

If you thought that Curfewed Night is all about violence and anger and hatred, you couldn’t be more wrong. Peer does not fail to see humour even when the talk is of fighting and death.

'One morning a young man from our village who worked in Srinagar gave a speech at the mosque. He grabbed the microphone and shouted, ‘Kabiran kabira!’ The slogan meant, ‘Who is the greatest?’ But no one understood. None of us spoke Arabic. He shouted again and there was silence – then the adolescents in the last row, the backbenchers of faith, began to laugh. Embarrassed, the young man explained that in reply to the slogan, we were supposed to shout ‘Allah o Akbar!’ (God is great.) He shouted again, ‘Kabiran kabira!’ He was answered with a hesitant, awkward ‘Allah o Akbar’. For about a year after, we teased him.'

I don’t mind repeating yet again that Peer writes very well. When Peer wants to elaborate how school students and teenagers idolised militants, he says:

‘Militants wore Kamachi shoes and boys wanted Kamachi shoes. Militants replaced the stones in their rings with pistol bullets and boys replaced the stones in their rings with pistol bullets.'

After about sixty pages on militancy in Kashmir, Peer starts telling us of how he moved to Delhi, studied at the Aligarh Muslim University and later Delhi University and then found employment as a journalist. After the shift to Delhi, I started to understand Peer a lot better. Suddenly, he became someone like me, someone I could understand, even relate to, in certain respects.

The attack on the Indian Parliament made life difficult for Peer on account of his Kashmiri origin. Unable to find a Landlord who would agree to have a Kashmiri Muslim tenant, Peer considered leaving Delhi, until a kindly Kashmiri Pandit landlady gave him a roof over his head. Peer devotes a number of pages to the Syed Geelani story pursuant to the attack on the Indian parliament. Geelani was convicted by the trial court under POTA solely on the basis of a semi-coherent two and a half minute phone call made on the day after the attack. Later the Delhi High Court acquitted Geelani, quite rightly in my opinion.

Once Peer decided to tell Kashmir’s story, he went out of his way to meet victims of torture by Indian security forces, displaced Pandits and even Indian soldiers - to find out their point of view. He succeeds admirably with regard to torture victims and Pandits, but I thought his effort with Indian army men was not very impressive.

Curfewed Night is a slim volume, it does not exceed 250 pages, but is crammed with information about Kashmir. There are stories of funerals of militants, of militants switching sides and joining the Kukka Parray, of (failed) attempts by fundamentalists like Asiya Andrabi to impose a Saudi style of Islam in Kashmir and how much it takes to bribe minor bureaucrats and policemen so that relatives of innocent people killed in the violence can get some compensation. Peer also throws in bits of Kashmir’s history here and there and one gets to know of its Buddhist heritage and how it became a part of the Mughal Empire.

The only factual error I could find was when Peer tells his readers that ‘Kashmir was the largest of the approximately five hundred princely states under British sovereignty as of 1947’ Wiki tells me that it was Hyderabad. Kashmir came in at number two. In these matters, I trust Wiki more than Peer.

Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields

2011-07-18T00:43:00.001+01:00

Just over a month ago, the UK’s Channel 4 aired a documentary that has lent credence to what were till now only allegations. Allegations of war crimes, human rights abuses and torture of prisoners by the victorious Sri Lankan forces as they routed the LTTE in the jungles of Northern and North Eastern Sri Lanka over two years ago. This documentary which is now available on YouTube shows the Sri Lankan army shelling Red Cross run hospitals, intentionally targeting civilians, executing enemy combatants in their custody and worst of all, raping and sexually abusing female prisoners before killing them. Each of these incidents seem to have taken place on a large enough scale to raise the possibility that they were not isolated incidents, but were carried out on a systematic basis with the knowledge and connivance or possibly even on the orders of those very high up in the Sri Lankan military hierarchy.

Channel 4’s documentary is reasonably even-handed and there are mentions of how the LTTE itself used civilians as human shields and prevented them from leaving from areas under their control. On one occasion, an LTTE suicide bomber detonated herself inside an Sri Lankan army run medical centre which was treating Tamil civilians. However, the LTTE was a terrorist group and the democratically elected Sri Lankan government cannot use the LTTE’s behaviour as an excuse for its.

Shame on you Sri Lanka!

“The Most Dangerous Place”, by Imtiaz Gul – Book Review

2011-07-14T04:43:00.003+01:00

Veteran Pakistani reporter Imtiaz Gul is also an executive director at the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. Gul’s book The Most Dangerous Place was first published by Penguin in early 2010 and as a paperback in 2011. Pakistan and Afghanistan have been in the global limelight for many years, for all the wrong reasons, and any book which focuses on the badlands of Pakistan is likely to become outdated very quickly, since there is so much happening every day in that part of the world. Maybe it is for this reason that The Most Dangerous Place comes with a preface, a preface to the paperback edition and an epilogue, each of which seeks to catch up with new developments and place the book in context.

Gul is a reporter and one of the first things that hits you even before you cross page 30 is that The Most Dangerous Place is almost entirely a compilation of past reports and quotations from various players with Gul almost never taking a stand or expressing an opinion of his own – until he gets to the last chapter, “Who Funds the Militants”. If one ignores the near total absence of the author’s opinions and views, one can get a blow by blow account of how, starting from the period just before the Soviet’s invaded Afghanistan, Pakistan got enmeshed in Jihadi politics, and fighting, which was at times between various Mujahidin factions, and ended up as the most dangerous place on earth.

As if to compensate for the absence of any analyses till then, the last chapter is packed with theories (most of them quotes given by others) and Gul finally expresses an opinion or two. Who funds the militants? Gul examines various possibilities. Are militants funded by the proceeds of cultivating poppy? Is the Frontier Corps also a culprit? Does the timber mafia have a hand in funding the Pakistani Taliban? What role do Islamic charities and the Hawala system play in funding insurgents? Do the Americans fund the Taliban? Gul does not rule out this possibility. Gul quotes Brigadier Mehmood Shah, a former security secretary for FATA who suggests that the Americans might be trying to co-opt some of the militants into their operational strategy and fix Al Qaeda from within. Is it Saudi Arabia? Not the Government of Saudi Arabia, Gul seems to say, though private individuals and parties based in Saudi Arabia could be funding the Pakistani Taliban.

Is there an Indian hand behind the Pakistani Taliban? No, Gul doesn’t rubbish this possibility, though it sounded ridiculous to my ears. Rather, he puts forth a lot of circumstantial evidence to suggest that there could be some truth behind this allegation. For example, after the Kandahar hijacking, an Indian security official is reported to have told Gul – “we will absorb what you have done to us, but can you absorb what we might do to you?” Gul quotes from Baitullah Mehsud’s aides who mention offers of alleged assistance from India. Gul doesn’t straight out say that he believes India is funding the Taliban in Pakistan – that would be too ludicrous. He does however try to build a case for this theory.

Is the ISI in cahoots with the militants in Pakistan? This is one theory which Gul categorically dismisses as silly – even this dismissal is done in a roundabout manner. Do please read this interesting book to know more about these theories and Gul’s views on them.

One of the good things about The Most Dangerous Place is that is has a number of trivia on the Taliban. We hear an explanation given by the Taliban to a potential suicide bomber who wanted to know why the Taliban never attacked Saudi Arabia or other Arab countries which shelter American troops. The answer is that “We receive funds from Arab countries, therefore we cannot carry out any attack there, and if we commit any wrong there, they will stop supply of funds to us. But Jihad in Pakistan and Afghanistan is lawful, even the Saudis believe so.”

There is a description of how the University of Nebraska, which had an association with Afghanistan ever since 1975, when its Afghan Centre linked up with Kabul University was tasked by the CIA in the early 1980s with producing new textbooks that would help inspire the Afghans to “jihad” against “infidel Soviets.” This message made its way into the pages of primary school textbooks in forms like this alphabet song:

A [is for] Allah. Allah is one
B [is for] Father (baba). Father goes to the mosque
D [is for] Religion (din). Our religion is Islam. The Russians are the enemies of the religion of Islam.
J [is for] Jihad. Jihad is an obligation. My mom went on jihad. My brother gave water to the Mujahidin.
P [is for] Five (panj). Islam has five pillars
V [is for] Nation (vatn). Our nation is Afghanistan. The Mujahidin made our nation famous. Our Muslim people are defeating the communists. The Mujahidin are making the dear country free.
Z [is for] Good news (muzhdih). The Mujahidin missiles rain down like dew on the Russians. My brother gave me the good news that the Russians in our country will taste defeat.

The lessons for older students were more explicit: one fourth-grade mathematics question asks students to use a bullet’s speed and its total distance travelled to calculate the elapsed time before its strikes its Russian target in the forehead.

In 2002, the Afghan Center at the University of Nebraska was approved to begin a fourteen-month, $6.4 million co-operative agreement with USAID, designed to assist in the opening of primary and secondary schools in Afghanistan by printing and distributing textbooks in Dari and Pashtu. An elederly Afghan teacher scribbles in a register, “we are now removing what we inserted into these books twenty years ago.”

Some of the best things about this book are its two appendices which has profiles of a number of Pakistani militants and militant organisations. For someone like me who is very much interested in knowing more about Pakistani militants and their groupings, this book serves as a treasure trove of information. A veritable encyclopaedia it is! Also, Gul’s descriptions of events such as the Kaloosha incident where scores of South Waziristan Scouts were killed and details of the fighting that took place in Swat, especially the tactics used by the Pakistani army in recapturing lost terrain and driving out the Taliban, are excellent.

Now that Osama bin Laden has been located and killed, every time I read a book on the Pakistani Taliban that was published prior to his killing, I look for theories on bin Laden’s location or predictions for his capture. Gul tells us that “Bajaur’s proximity to Kunar fuels suspicions that Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri may be hiding in the area.” A few pages later, this theory is mentioned again. In the first paragraph of the original preface, Gul quotes Barack Obama who mentions bin Laden’s name as he elaborated how the Af-Pak border is the most dangerous place on earth. Towards the end of the first chapter, Gul tells us that “back in the 1980s, Osama bin Laden had also found sanctuary on the fringes of Miranshah in North Waziristan, the tribal agency that borders the eastern Afghan province of Khost.’ There are a few references to Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mullah Omar as well. In his epilogue, Gul says that “it is unlikely that Pakistan will go after the most wanted leaders of Al Qaeda or the Afghan Taliban, such as Mullah Omar or Gulbuddin Hekmetyar.” Right! Pakistan didn’t, but the United States did. In all probability Gul was as surprised as anyone else when bin Laden was located and killed in Abbottabad, not far from the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad where Gul works.

“Descent into Chaos: Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Threat to Global Security”, by Ahmed Rashid – A Few Observations

2011-06-27T05:39:00.006+01:00

I recently re-read Ahmed Rashid’s “Descent into Chaos” which was released sometime in the middle of 2008. A masterpiece by an expert who has very peers in his field, Descent into Chaos is relevant and useful for someone who wants to understand the Af-Pak conundrum, even three years after its publication. Rather that write a detailed review of this excellent book which has been reviewed so many times by so many clever writers, I propose to make a few observations:

1. After the caveat that Hamid Karzai is a good friend, Rashid has nothing but praise for Karzai who hasn’t exactly lived up to the expectations created when he took over power. The number of times Rashid criticizes Karzai can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I found the near total absence of criticism of Karzai to be the biggest drawback in this book.

2. Rashid devotes extensive space to explain how the US administration under George Bush flagrantly breached the Geneva Convention as it set up detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay and other places and carried out renditions of suspected Islamic fundamentalists. I wonder if Rashid would continue to feel so strongly about the use of torture in light of the fact that information gleaned from suspects through the use of intensive interrogation techniques helped locate Bin Laden. The fact of the matter is that torture does work at times and those who are against the use of torture should be willing to say that States should not resort to torture even if it may work.

3. Rashid describes Nawaz Sharif thus: ‘A businessman from Lahore whose family had prospered enormously under the Zia regime was a dour, unintelligent politician who had been promoted and patronized by the military.’ I find this description very interesting. I’ve never heard anyone else call Sharif unintelligent. Mind you, I have no reason to think Rashid has got it wrong.

4. Rashid has only praise for Benazir Bhutto, even more than he has for Karzai. There is a vague mention of the corruption charges against Bhutto, but Rashid tells us that ‘There is little doubt that Bhutto and Karzai working together would have formed a team committed to combat extremism.’

5. Asif Zardari is depicted as a wise man who, unfortunately and for no fault of his own, happens to be corrupt.

I guess when one is Pakistani and is close to most of the big players in that region, one is bound to have a few sacred cows in one’s backpack. I realise that my observations above may give the impression that I did not like ‘Descent into Chaos’. Far from it, I really liked the book and Rashid’s pithy style of writing.

Rashid concludes by saying that (remember this is mid-2008): ‘The American people have elected a new President who is largely committed to change and improving the world we live in. Obama has generated enormous expectations in the Muslim world, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In order to live upto those expectations, he has to help deliver a long-lasting peace and stabilization program in the region.’

The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed – A Book Review

2011-06-14T11:27:00.002+01:00

'Captain Kadian takes a large swig from his glass tumbler, closes his eyes for a moment, smacks his lips and says, "the job is not that hard you see, you just .....................'

The opening sentence of Mirza Waheed’s novel gave me the feeling that I was reading one of those Soviet era books set in the years following the October revolution and that ‘Kadian’ was possibly the abbreviation of an Armenian name. But no, Captain Kadian is employed by the Indian army, has been deployed in Kashmir for a three-year tour of duty and is responsible for most of the unnamed Protagonist’s nightmares. Though ‘Kadian’ is not a common Indian name, Wikipedia informs me that there exists a Jat clan called Kadian and we are told by the author that Captain Kadian is ‘young, handsome, north Indian. A Punjabi perhaps, a Jat probably.’ A humble Gujjar lad, the Protagonist is a collaborator who runs dirty errands for the cruel Captain Kadian, who the Protagonist hates and fears in equal measure.

I began to hate The Collaborator even before I crossed the first twenty pages. Set against the backdrop of the insurgency in Kashmir in the early 1990s, The Collaborator depicts the Indian army as extremely ruthless and cruel. There are mentions of large scale massacres and mass-rapes where all women in a village are raped. I do know that truth is the first casualty in any war and that there have been human rights abuses by Indian security forces, but I felt that the ‘allegations’ in The Collaborator are over the top. More importantly, it shows the Indian army as overwhelmingly strong, powerful and successful in fighting the insurgency, practically killing insurgents at will. No sooner do a number of Kashmiri boys trained in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir cross over into India than the Indian army crunches into action and kills off most of those crossing over at a time of the army’s choosing. In fact the author goes to the extent of telling us, through Captain Kadian, that the Border Security force (BSF) is even tougher and nastier than the Indian army. There is one instance where the BSF’s intelligence unit, the G-Branch, is shown as giving the army a lesson in mountain warfare when some militants were holed out in a few caves and the army didn’t know how to clear them out!

However, as I progressed, I got to know the Protagonist better, and even his fears and dreams, I started appreciating The Collaborator better. The Protagonist, who remains unnamed till the end, does not appear to support Azadi in any serious manner. True, he is petrified of the Indian army and the black cat commandoes who carry out the occasional cordon and search operation and dawn raids. He admires the Kashmiri insurgents who are always shown as inferior in strength to the Indian army, whose soldiers are very shown to be very fit and strong. He is fearful of the ruthless and cruel Pathans, Afghans, Arabs and Chechens who have contempt for Kashmiris’ fighting abilities. He gets bugged when a militant group broke up video rental shops, torched cinemas, dragged frightened little girls out of school, checked their hands for nail polish and sent them home in knee-length burqas. We hear that Gujjars are not trusted by other Kashmiris, though some of them do become insurgents. Slowly we get to know that the Protagonist’s father, the village sarpanch, had fought the tribal raiders from Pakistan just after independence. The sarpanch is liked by the villagers who saved him from the insurgents’ wrath.

After all his friends cross the Loc and go to Pakistan and he is the only teenager left behind in the village, the Protagonist too tries to follow then over the LoC. As he proceeds towards his rendezvous with the guide who is to take him across, he thinks thus of Pakistan: ‘A place of which I had an obscure vision, an image, as being the country where we boys went to become militants and which supported us and welcomed us with open arms, and where they were all Muslims and were in fact sending their own sons to fight alongside us, but a place I did not really know. It was, now I understand, and still is, a khayal, just an idea.’ The Protagonist does not make it across since he is turned away by the guide, with a gentle reminder of his father’s past fighting tribal raiders and accepting government grants.

Captain Kadian uses the Protagonist for a dirty chore. The chore itself is unrealistic (I would rather not reveal what it is and play spoil sport) and descriptions of Captain Kadian’s operations are equally unrealistic, as explained earlier. The soldiers are there in strength in the Protagonist’s village since it is very close to the LoC. Around there, ‘the Indians kill just about everyone. Who will know and object, leave along protest, in this remote, cut-off wilderness? You know, sometimes I wonder – because for Kashmir, there is always an Indian and a Pakistani version of everything – what if they have their own pasture of dead boys on the other side of the border? Their own stash of the infiltration residue? Young men who lost their lives while learning to walk the perilous path to freedom. Treachery is a word everyone should learn.’ One hears an old man tell the Protagonist of elite Makara soldiers who even eat people, old people mostly. The Protagonist seems to believe every word he hears. Later when the Protagonist’s friends leave him behind and cross the LoC, the village is at the receiving end of the army’s raids. Curfew is imposed for days at a stretch.

Kashmir has a new governor, a man very stern and ruthless, who is described as ‘the former leader of the demolition gangs and their bulldozers (who ran over the one-room tenements and lavatories of the poorest of poor squatters in India’s capital because their haphazard slum-clusters had no storm-water drains), the clinical undertaker of forced, compulsory vasectomies.....’ Though not mentioned by name, it is very obvious that the reference is to Jagmohan Malhotra who was the governor of Jammu & Kashmir from 1984 to 1989 and then for a few months in 1990. I found this implicit reference to Jagmohan a bit confusing since in the beginning of the novel, there is a reference to a dead militant’s watch which keeps ticking and shows the date as ‘16 April 1993’. The blurb on one of the side flaps of this book says ‘It is Kashmir in the early 1990s......’ From May 1990 to March 1993, Girish Chandra Saxena was the Governor of Jammu & Kashmir and not Jagmohan, but hey, this is fiction and one shouldn’t nitpick, right?

Towards the end of the novel, one hears of the insurgents torturing the guide and his family who they (wrongly) suspect of having helped the Indian army. By that time, the villagers have had enough of searches and curfews. They all pack up and leave, all except the Protagonist and his parents. Where do the villagers escape to, with all their cattle and other belongings? Do they cross the LoC in the middle of the winter? I was half-expecting them to, since they had nowhere else to go. But no, to escape from the Indian army, they flee to ‘India’! By this stage, I had started liking the Collaborator.

A lot of the information that is conveyed to the reader by the Protagonist is hearsay. A man is snatched from the Protagonist’s village by black-cat commandoes who turn up in LMG-mounted gypsies. The Protagonist tells us that from a distance, the commandoes looked like a ‘pack of animals’. After the snatched man is returned to the village, theories abound. One theory is that he was not harmed at all since he readily divulged all that he knew. Another theory is that ‘he was tortured day and night by Kashmiri Pandit police officers, bent on revenge after their tragic exodus from the valley...... Another theory was that ‘he was made to pee on an electric heater while they threw ice-cold water over him; they pierced a red-hot knitting needle through his...... Finally the Protagonist goes to visit the victim one afternoon and without being asked, the victim lifts up his kurta and shows the area above his groin which has small, etched black pits all over the pubic area.

Captain Kadian trusts the Protagonist sufficiently enough to give him a pistol. The Protagonist hates Captain Kadian enough to want to use it on Captain Kadian. Does the Protagonist summon enough courage to do so? Do please read this extremely interesting book, written in exquisite prose, to find out. Exaggerations notwithstanding, it is a very good read.

The Author of The Collaborator Mirza Waheed spent his childhood in Srinagar, read English Literature at the University of Delhi and later worked as a journalist in Delhi for four years. Since 2001, he has been living in London where he works for the BBC's Urdu Service as an editor.

Book Review: “Absolute Khushwant”

2011-06-11T04:50:00.005+01:00

I am a hardcore fan of Khushwant Singh’s writings and think he is the best Indian writer alive today. I picked up Absolute Khushwant in order to know more about Khushwant the human being. A simple book of 189 pages, it appears to have been dictated by 95 year old Khushwant Singh to Humra Quraishi over a few days. The narration is rambling and there are repetitions, but this book is the closest thing to Khushwant Singh’s autobiography.

Absolute Khushwant doesn’t hold many surprises. Khushwant Singh is not a reticent man and people who follow his writings would be aware of his views of topics ranging from the Emergency to Indira Gandhi to Operation Blue Star to the BJP. Khushwant Singh doesn’t hold back on his personal life either. He talks of his first love, how he visited a prostitute for the first time, his unhappy marriage (which was not an arranged one), how he had courted his wife-to-be etc.

I knew that Khushwant Singh was not a prude and I was not disappointed. “If you ask me what’s more important, sex or romance, it’s sex. Romance is just a gloss, some sort of sheen that wears off, and it loses its lustre very soon. I’ve never really had the time or the inclination for romance. Romantic interludes take up a lot of time and are a sheer waste of energy, for the end result isn’t very much. Sex is definitely more important, though sex with the same person can get boring after a while..... When it comes to sex, I don’t think looks matter much.”

The Partition of India left Khushwant Singh badly wounded. Khushwant Singh feels that Partition was inevitable since Hindus and Muslims had not integrated. They did not inter-marry, did not share food or living quarters. No, Khushwant Singh does not say that they were/are two separate nations, but that would be the logical conclusion to his argument. But Khushwant Singh also suggests that Partition could have been avoided if Jawaharlal Nehru hadn’t been so keen to become independent India’s Prime Minister. According to Khushwant Singh, “having accepted the Cabinet mission plan to hand over power to a united India, he (Nehru) reneged on his undertaking when he (Nehru) realized Jinnah might end up becoming Prime Minister." Khushwant Singh thinks Nehru was the second best Prime Minister India has ever had. He admires Nehru’s secularism and atheism, but doesn’t seem to have liked him much. He tells us that Nehru had vision and charisma, but was instinctively anti-American and pro-Soviet. Nehru was impatient with people and had favourites. Like Indira, Nehru can be accused of nepotism.

Khushwant Singh liked Sanjay Gandhi, despite the damage he did to India’s democracy, something Khushwant Singh acknowledges. However, since “Sanjay was always extremely courteous towards me” Khushwant Singh continues to like him. I found Khushwant Singh’s honesty in this regard extremely refreshing.

Khushwant Singh tells us that Nirad C. Chaudhuri is the most knowledgeable person he has ever known.

Khushwant Singh also believes Manmohan Singh is the best PM we have ever had. To illustrate his point, Khushwant Singh has this anecdote about how Manmohan Singh’s son-in-law came to borrow some money during Manmohan Singh’s election campaign. The amount borrowed was just two lakhs, to hire taxis that were needed for the election campaign. “They didn’t even have that much to spare. I gave the money in cash. Only days after he had lost the election, Manmohan Singh called me himself and asked for an appointment. He came to see me with a packet. ‘I haven’t used the money,’ he said and handed me the packet with all the cash I had given his son-in-law. That kind of thing, no politician would do.” Here I find myself unable to agree with Khushwant Singh. If Manmohan Singh is incapable of effectively utilising for his campaign two lakh rupees given to him legitimately by a supporter, does it suggest a capable politician or a timid bureaucrat who his afraid of taking risks and independent decisions?

I read this rambling account in one go, in around three hours' time. Absolute Khushwant is a must-read for every fan of Khushwant Singh’s writings.

The Other Charlie

2011-06-08T04:48:00.003+01:00

On 31 May 2011, I had posted a short story Charlie. For those who liked it and for those who didn’t, I’d like to bring to your notice the existence of another Charlie on Epic India. The other Charlie was written first and has a different plot and ends differently (and has fewer characters too), though the initial few paragraphs are rather similar. Please do take a look and let me know which "Charlie" you like better (or dislike less)

Short Story: Charlie

2011-05-31T05:46:00.011+01:00

I met Charlie for the first time inside Kunal’s Hyundai Accent. The three of them, Charlie, Kunal and the car, couldn’t have been more different from each other. The Hyundai Accent was sleek, shiny and snazzy, Kunal was short, stout, and sleazy and Charlie was, well, he was from the bogs. The orange tee-shirt and maroon jeans that he wore might have given Charlie the feeling that he was as good as any other man in Mumbai. The earring clipped to his left lobe did give him an air of dashing, but the half-broken front tooth, surrounded by the decaying, blackened remains of the rest of his teeth, was a dead giveaway.

‘That’s the building Sir. It’s on the fifth floor,’ Kunal told us as he stopped the car in what was evidently a no-parking zone.

‘Come on Sir, let’s go,’ Kunal said.

I hesitated. ‘You car will get towed away,’ I said.

‘No-parking zone. Can’t park here.’ Hitesh added. I sat back. I was just a trainee and I was darned if I moved when my boss was staying put.

‘Charlie will stay in the car Sir. Anyway, we won’t take more than five minutes.’

Charlie stared straight ahead and smiled. It was a nice smile, despite the state of his teeth. We got out of the car and crossed the road. We followed Kunal. How could someone so fat, move so fast?

‘Having Charlie inside the car as I show my clients around is cheaper than paying parking charges. And I save time as well.’

I thought no more about Charlie for a while after that since we had more pressing things to do. A new CEO was taking over in ten days’ time and the admin department was expected to have a home fit for a CEO all spruced up and ready when the new man arrived from Delhi. We had been referred to Kunal, who immediately promised to show us not less than six flats a day. ‘I know all the brokers who work for Landlords in this area,’ he glibly assured me over the phone.

‘How much do you charge? The usual one month’s rent?’

‘No Sir. One and half. I am much better than others, that’s why Sir.’

We had gone along, since we didn’t really have a choice. Kunal was as good as his word and soon Hitesh and I were at Kunal’s office, a small cubby-hole inside a shopping mall, not far from where the new flat was, to collect the keys. I was seeing Charlie outside a car for the first time. Standing behind Kunal’s chair, he looked much smaller than when he was inside the car, not more than five feet three and pencil thin.

‘Sir, thank you for coming here. If you could have told me the precise time you would arrive, I could have met you outside the flat and given you the keys.’ Kunal was as servile as ever.

‘We don’t mind,’ Hitesh spoke for both of us, though I did mind. It didn’t matter. I was just a trainee and wasn’t expected to have a mind of my own. ‘I wasn’t sure when I would be finishing work,’ Hitesh added.

‘Sir, you work Saturdays?’ Kunal sounded shocked.

‘Sometimes, I have to,’ Hitesh admitted, not trying too hard to dispel the hint of martyrdom in his voice.

‘We work on Sundays too,’ Charlie piped in. ‘Sheth works everyday and so do I.’ That was the first time I had heard Charlie speak and his accent was such that you could smell the slum on him.

As far as I could make out, Charlie had nothing much to do in that office, other than maybe clean it everyday. He definitely wasn’t capable of doing any paperwork. Why on earth did Kunal have to have Charlie with him at all times? Maybe so that he could take him in his car if he had to take a client to view flats at short notice. Parking charges in Bandra were pretty high.

‘Sir, this folder has all the documents. Your CEO’s police NoC, a copy of the leave and licence agreement…’

‘And what else?’

‘That’s it Sir. Door-to-door service Sir. You didn’t have to worry about your CEO’s police verification did you Sir?’

‘No, no..’

‘And the registration hardly took any time, did it Sir?’

‘No, no.......’

‘If you had gone on your own Sir, it would have taken you a whole day Sir.’

‘I know, I know..’ Hitesh mumbled. Why doesn’t he give Kunal a piece of his mind? I wondered. Bloody hell, we had paid this bugger three lakh rupees. He might as well fix the police verification and deed registration without blowing his trumpet about it.

‘Sir, Charlie will take you to the flat.’

‘We can go ourselves. Just give me the keys.’

‘Sure Sir. Here are the keys Sir. But…’ At that Kunal stopped and leaned over to Hitesh. ‘Please take Charlie with you Sir. The flat needs cleaning, doesn’t it? Get Charlie to do it for you. Pay him something, but agree on the price first.’

Yes, the flat was dirty and it would take some labour to get it tidy before the furniture arrived on Monday. I couldn’t think of a decent excuse to not take Charlie and get him to do the cleaning, though I could see that Hitesh would rather not utilise Charlie’s labour. I could see that he had for some reason taken a dislike to Charlie though I couldn’t figure out why. I hoped Hitesh wouldn’t turn down Kunal’s offer and ask me to clean the flat myself. For heaven’s sake, I was a trainee in the admin department and not a domestic help. Thankfully Hitesh said, ‘sure, that’s a good idea. When does he finish work? Six?’

‘No Sir No.’ You can take him now. I don’t mind.’

‘Okay. Good. Charlie, come on. Let’s go.’

‘Charlie, do a good job for Sir. Sir, please take these keys. This is for the front door, this here….,’

Hitesh pocketed the keys and walked out. I followed him and Charlie trailed us both. The moment we were out of the shopping mall, Charlie quickened his pace and started to walk by our side.

‘I have been with my Sheth for sixteen years. I started with his father. Sixteen years,’ he added in English.

I nodded my head politely, whilst Hitesh ignored him. ‘Where do you stay Charlie?’ I asked him.

‘Mira Road.’

‘You come to Bandra by train everyday?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is Charlie your real name?’

‘No, it’s Kailash. Sheth’s father gave me the name Charlie.

‘I’ll take a quick look at the flat and push off. You hang around and make sure this boy cleans the flat,’ Hitesh told me. I nodded my head, but Hitesh wasn’t looking at me anymore.

Do you have soap powder and a broom? And a bucket and a mug?’ Charlie asked Hitesh.

‘Look at me,’ Hitesh said giving Charlie an exasperated look. ‘Am I carrying soap powder and a bucket?’

‘Well, we better buy them. There’s that shop over there. It’s got all that we need. We need some wifers also. Wifers clean mast.’ I wanted to ask what a wifer was, but didn’t.

Charlie elbowed his way through the rush of people who crowded around the long formica table that separated the shopkeeper and his goods from the customers. Hitesh and I meekly followed Charlie, ignoring the irritated looks we got.

‘One broom. A bucket. Mug. Soap powder. Cleaning spray. And a wifer. And three of that.’ Charlie’s finger pointed to a pile of rough towels that could be used as mops. I waited for the shopkeeper to ask Charlie what a wifer was, but he didn’t. Instead he said, ‘we have run out of ……….’ Did the shopkeeper too say wifer? I wasn’t sure. Before Charlie could respond, he added, ‘there’s a new cleaning fluid. Take it.’

‘Should we go elsewhere for the, the…. the wifer?’ Hitesh asked Charlie. Slowly it dawned on me that Charlie was talking about a wiper.

‘No, don’t bother. Those cloth mops will do.’ I knew that Hitesh would be irritated because Charlie didn’t call him ‘Sir’ as Kunal did. I was pretty sure that when he agreed to take Charlie along, Hitesh had taken for granted that Charlie would be even more obsequious than Kunal.

Charlie then raised his voice and told the shopkeeper. ‘give us a discount.’ He then turned to Hitesh and said, ‘I always buy cleaning products from here. He’ll give us a discount.’

‘I don’t care about the discount,’ Hitesh muttered to me. ‘We will be able to claim anything that has an invoice.’

I guessed what Hitesh was worried about. Whatever he paid Charlie would not have an invoice. ‘Maybe we can ask Kunal to give us an invoice for the money we pay Charlie,’ I suggested.

‘Like hell we will get an invoice,’ Hitesh’s voice was bitter. ‘This is a nice scheme that Kunal has set up. I am sure he pays Charlie next to nothing, though he uses him to save on parking fees. Instead we end up paying this bastard exorbitant amounts to get some cleaning done.’

Ha! So this was why Hitesh had taken a dislike to Charlie. ‘We don’t know how much Charlie will want us to pay him,’ I whispered.

Hitesh ignored my comment and muttered, ‘I’m sure the prices here are inflated by ten percent for people like us, so that Charlie can get us a discount.’ ‘Maybe he is getting a kickback from the shopkeeper every month for the cleaning products he buys for the people whose houses he cleans.’

As Hitesh paid the shopkeeper, Charlie told the shopkeeper, ‘give me three Frootis.’ He took out his wallet and extracted a fifty-rupee note. ‘This one’s for you,’ Charlie pushed two Frootis towards us.

‘I don’t want one.’ Hitesh’s voice brooked no further entreaties.

‘Go on, have one. I am a bindass chap. I am just treating the three of us.

‘I don’t want one.’

I had no option but to say that I didn’t want one either, though it was very hot and I would have liked to have had a Frooti. ‘Okay. I’ll just take two and give one to my Sheth. No, it won’t be cold when I give it to him. I’ll buy one for him later. I’ll only take one.’ Charlie pushed two Frootis back to the other end of the counter.

We walked to the flat, Charlie carrying the bucket with everything in it. Everything except the broom which was in my hand.

‘Once he finishes the Frooti, make sure you give him the broom,’ Hitesh told me and walked ahead. Charlie and I followed him.

‘Listen, Hitesh is an Assistant Manager in the Admin Department. He is a big guy. You ought to call him Sir,’ I suggested to Charlie in a low monotone.

‘But I never call anyone Sir. Not even my Sheth.’ Charlie’s quick response was loud enough for Hitesh to hear, though Hitesh didn’t turn back. I could however see the back of his neck turn red. Charlie finished the Frooti and threw away the tetra pack, but he didn’t offer to take the broom from me. Here, take this as well, I wanted to tell him, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

The flat was large and airy, supposedly one of the most luxurious two bedroom flats in Bandra. However, it was rather depressing inside. The previous tenants seemed to have played the who-can-sprinkle-more-dust game with mud-splattered feet, followed by who-clogs-the-drain-first. And then replaced all bulbs and tube-lights with ones that didn’t work. Finally they had probably played guess-what-I-just-broke.

Charlie took one look around the flat and asked Hitesh, ‘how much will you pay me?’

‘How much do you want?

‘Thousand rupees.’

‘Can you do it for five hundred?’ Hitesh asked.

Charlie hesitated and said, ‘No. I could go down to nine hundred.’

‘That’s still too high for half-a-day’s work.

Charlie shrugged his shoulders and stood there silently. ‘You will be paying two lakhs per month as rent for this flat. Can’t you pay me nine hundred rupees?’

‘This is not my money my friend. It is the company’s money.’

‘Won’t your company be paying the rent for this flat?’

‘Yes, so what?’

‘And it can’t pay me nine hundred rupees?’

‘It can, but it won’t. You carry on. I’ll get someone else to clean the flat.’

‘No problem. Maybe you can ask one of the neighbours if they can spare a maid.’

Hitesh looked up and down at Charlie as if he were something that should rightfully be inside the expensive but dirty toilet attached to the master bedroom.

“Give me a call, if you don’t find a maid, but I’ll never call you Sir.’ With that Charlie was off. I wished I had half, no, one-fourth, of his guts. I would have happily parted with all the money in my bank account, which wasn’t much, and pledged my salary for the next one year to have acquired Charlie’s guts and devil-may-care attitude.

After Charlie closed the door behind him, Hitesh said, ‘we’ve got to have this place cleaned up by tomorrow evening. We can’t have dirt all over the place when the furniture arrives Monday morning.’

‘We could go out and find someone else. Maybe Kunal can send someone else. Why don’t we...?’

‘Why don’t we ask the neighbours if they can spare a maid for a few hours?’

‘Sure. I hope the neighbours turn out to be helpful.’

I think I sounded hesitant because Hitesh looked at me as if I was being silly. Why on earth wouldn’t the neighbours jump at the opportunity to lend us a maid? his look suggested.

We went out of the flat and paused outside the neighbouring flat. There were only two flats on each floor. A deathly silence prevailed. Hitesh pressed the buzzer and we waited. The deathly silence continued. Hitesh pressed the buzzer yet again. It was a Saturday. Surely someone had to be at home!

Just as we were preparing to turn around and leave, the door opened and a woman in her mid-thirties stood in front of us. Hitesh and I breathed a sigh of relief. From the woman’s attire and her demeanour, it was obvious that she belonged to that endangered species referred to as ‘maids’, without whom day-to-day life would collapse all over the world.

‘Hello!’ I was tongue-tied for a moment. What should I say? That I, a mere trainee had just moved into flat 401, one of the most luxurious flats in Bandra? Hitesh obviously did not suffer from such inhibitions.

‘We have just moved into that flat.’ Hitesh jerked his thumb behind.

‘Yes.’

‘W need someone to clean the flat. It is very dirty.’

We got a mumbled response that I didn’t comprehend. What was she saying? That she would do it right away?

‘Excuse me?’ Hitesh moved forward a bit and that caused the gentle creature in front of us to retreat in fear.

‘I work here full-time.’

‘So what? Can’t you take a couple of hours off and clean our flat? I’ll pay you two hundred rupees. At that, a look of disdain passed over that gentle creature’s features who shouted out for her mistress. ‘Mem-sa’ab!’ The lady of the house materialised from nowhere.

‘We have just moved into flat 401 and I was asking your maid if she could clean my flat. I will pay her of course.’

‘If she goes to clean your flat, who will do my work?’

‘It’s just for a few hours.’ How could you be so unreasonable as to prevent your poor maid from making a little extra? Hitesh seemed to ask.

‘No.’

‘But what’s the big deal?’ The woman turned her head and said something and a big deal appeared in the form of the woman’s husband, tall, well-built and moustachioed.

‘What’s the matter?’ His deep-throated voice was a roar.

‘These men want our bai to clean their flat. I said No, but they won’t listen’

Hello! I did not ask your bai to clean the flat. He did. No, I didn’t say that, though I wanted to.

‘Just for two hours. I only…’

‘Didn’t she say No?’ Was the man a policeman? He certainly sounded like one!

Hitesh mumbled his apologies for having wasted their very, very valuable time and left.

We then took the lift went downstairs to the lobby. The concierge was very courteous.

‘I just moved into Flat 401. I need a a maidservant. Someone who can clean the Flat…’

‘Sir, you are from the company Sir?’

‘What?’ Hitesh was nonplussed.

‘Your CEO will move in on Tuesday right?’

‘I am a Manager in the Admin Department.’ Now Hitesh was angry.

‘Okay Sir. Now what do you want?’

‘I want a maid who can clean the flat. It’s very dirty.’ Hitesh managed to make it sound as if it was the concierge’s fault that the flat was dirty.

‘Okay Sir. I will ask someone to come and meet you Monday morning Sir.’

‘But I want it cleaned today or tomorrow. We have furniture arriving early in the morning on Monday. A regular maid can wait.’

‘I don’t know Sir. Today is Saturday Sir. Saturday afternoon. Let me see Sir.’

We went back to the flat.

‘You know, if I were younger, I would have cleaned it myself. It’s not such a big deal, you know,’ Hitesh told me as he flicked a piece of paper off a window sill. I ignored the remark, pointedly looking at my shoes.

‘Call Charlie!’ Hitesh finally told me, with the air of a bankrupt businessman ordering a fire sale. ‘I am going to make that piece of shit work so hard, that he will remember it for the rest of his life.’

I called up Kunal. ‘Yes, we changed our minds. We want Charlie to do the cleaning. Yes, we will pay him what he had asked.’

Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door. It was Charlie.

As Hitesh and I stood by silently, Charlie picked up the broom and started sweeping the floor in the living room without much ado. Hitesh and I walked around the flat aimlessly.

‘Please don’t go there. I just swept it. Take a look at the hall? Isn’t the floor almost clean? Once I scrub it, it will be mast.’

‘Okay.’ ‘I hate the word mast.’ Hitesh muttered to me.

Soon Charlie was scrubbing the floor with soapy water. ‘Isn’t it looking mast?’ he would ask us every few minutes. ‘Yes, it’s looking better.’ Hitesh would respond. I kept quiet.

‘If I scrub the window panes with a cloth, it won’t look mast. I need a wifer for it. Else, it will have marks all over and the window will look darkish.’

‘Never mind, just clean it with a cloth.’

‘Okay,’ Charlie agreed.

‘Aren’t the floors really mast now?’

I had to admit that Charlie was doing a good job. However, Hitesh wasn’t impressed. ‘Listen, you’ve got to clean the doors and windows, remember.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I’m going to make this little pipsqueak call me Sir,’ Hitesh muttered to me with a smile on his face.

‘How are you going to do it?’

‘Pay him an extra hundred. I’m sure he will do it. I never call anyone Sir. Not even my Sheth’ I laughed at Hitesh’s falsetto voice.

Watching Charlie clean the place was not unlike watching paint dry. It’s relatively comfortable watching paint dry if you are sitting rather than standing. Since there was not a single piece of furniture inside the house, we had to stand.

‘I’m going to use the loo.’

‘I’ve just cleaned the toilet!’ Charlie protested as he saw Hitesh open the toilet’s door.

‘I know. Does it mean no one can use it hereafter?’

When Hitesh came out he said, ‘there’s no point in hanging around here. I am going to go down and have a bite. You stay here.’

‘Actually, I’m hungry as well. I’ll also come down.’ I could tell that Hitesh didn’t like it all that much, but he said nothing. We went down and walked a bit till we came to a small kiosk by the road. Save for a teenager standing by the counter, munching on something fried and greasy, it had no customers.

‘I’ll have a vada pav,’ Hitesh announced.

‘I’m going to buy a packet of biscuits and eat it on my way back.’

‘You won’t satisfy your hunger with a packet of biscuits. Have a vada pav as well. Go on.’

‘No. No.’ There must have been something about the way I compressed my lips as I spoke that stopped Hitesh from pressing me any further.

Hitesh licked clean his oily thumb and forefinger and then used them to gingerly prise out his wallet from his hip pocket. Holding the brown wallet in the clean palm of his left hand, he gingerly took out a twenty rupee note and paid for his vada pav. However as he tried to put back his wallet, he dropped it. Before I could pick it up, the teenager who was leaving, bent down and picked it up. I grabbed it from him and told Hitesh, ‘turn around. Let me put it back for you.’

Hitesh’s trousers must have been a tad too tight for him and I had to use a bit of force to shove his wallet back inside his hip pocket.

‘Don’t you want to buy a packet of biscuits?’

‘No, I am no longer hungry.’ That got me a strange look, but I ignored it.

We went to the flat and Charlie was still hard at work.

‘Please leave your shoes outside. They are bound to be dirty!’

We stood around for some more time, both Hitesh and I surfing the internet on our mobile phones. I really don’t know how I would have survived those two hours if I didn’t have internet access.

Soon we heard water running from the washbasin and a few minutes later Charlie stood in front of us wiping his wet hands on his trousers. ‘All done!’ But Hitesh wasn’t done yet. ‘There are some stains on the front door. Here, take a look.’

Charlie promptly picked up a wet mop and a bottle of cleaning fluid, sprayed it liberally on the door and started scrubbing it enthusiastically. As soon as he was done, he ran over to the kitchen, put the fluid and wet mop on the kitchen top near the sink and went to the toilet to wash his hands once more. I walked around and looked. Charlie had done a good job.

‘There’s still so much dust and dirt everywhere!’ Hitesh muttered to me, ‘but this is the best this bastard can do.’

‘Now watch this,’ Hitesh told me. ‘Charlie, why won’t you call me Sir, like your Sheth does?’

Charlie looked at Hitesh, at a total loss for words.

‘Not that it matters to me, but I’d like to know why.’ Hitesh spoke very gently, not unlike a school master trying to understand a student’s dyslexia.

‘I just never call anyone....’

‘Charlie, if you call me Sir, I will pay you a hundred rupees more. Call me Sir and I’ll pay you a thousand rupees. If not, I can only pay your nine hundred. What’ll it be? A thousand or a nine hundred?’

Charlie had obviously never been offered a hundred rupees to address someone as “Sir”. He was puzzled, but not angry. ‘Why not? I will call you “Sir”. And you will...’

‘Pay you a hundred extra, a thousand rupees in all.’

‘Sir.’

‘Go on!’

‘I just did.’

‘Did what?’

‘Called you “Sir”.’

‘I didn’t hear it. Come on, once more.’

‘Sir. You are a “Sir”.’

‘Okay. Good lad. Now here’s the money.’ Hitesh took out his wallet and opened it. I looked at Hitesh and not his wallet. I could see his face fall. It was not very difficult to see why. Hitesh’s wallet didn’t have a single rupee inside! His cards were there, but the currency notes were gone.

‘Where’s my money?’ Hitesh demanded of the world at large. ‘That boy at the vada pav shop must have swiped it when he fell. He must have been very quick. How could he.............’

‘Where’s my thousand rupees?’ Charlie demanded of Hitesh.

‘Don’t worry. I have the money. I took out my wallet as Charlie looked on gratefully.

‘Do you have enough?’ Hitesh asked me. ‘If not, we can go to an ATM and get some money.’

‘I have, I have.. I have eight hundred and ninety rupees. And I have some change as well. I took out fifteen rupees in change.

Do you have any change?’ I asked Hitesh.

Hitesh dug into his pockets and came up with a two rupee coin. ‘Never mind, we’ll go to an ATM and get some money. And I want to find that boy who picked up my wallet.’

‘You aren’t going anywhere. I want my money first.’

‘Here’s nine hundred rupees.’ I gave the notes and coins to Charlie who pocketed the money. ‘And we’ll give you the rest soon.’

‘No, I want it now. Or else..’

‘Or else what?’ Hitesh was furious.

‘Or else, I’ll break your nose’ Charlie gripped Hitesh by his arm. I could see the colour drain out of his face. Hitesh was no street fighter! I too drew back frightened.

‘Listen, we have paid you nine hundred rupees. That was the agreed amount!’

‘Yes, but you made me call you “Sir”. Now pay me hundred rupees right away.’

‘That was just a joke!’

‘Was it? Well, it’s your turn now.’

‘What?’

‘Call me “Sir”!’

‘You got to be kidding.’

‘You better call me “Sir” or else...’

Charlie fist was much smaller than Hitesh’s or mine, but it was a lot more menacing.

‘Sir!’ Hitesh spluttered out the words.

Charlie seemed to be shocked as well. He had not expected such an easy capitulation.

‘Once more!’

‘What! I just called you.

‘But I called you "Sir" three or four times.’

‘Sir!’ This time, Hitesh spoke reluctantly, but his words were clear nevertheless.

As we walked to the nearest ATM machine, Hitesh and I didn’t utter a single word, other than Hitesh telling me, ‘make sure you are around when the furniture arrives on Monday.’

Hitesh withdrew a thousand rupees from the ATM after which he caught a prowling auto and quickly disappeared from sight. I slowly walked on to Bandra railway station. As I entered, I saw a rather healthy looking beggar, a man in his early forties. On an impulse, I gave him fifty rupees. I decided that I would be generous with every beggar I saw that evening.

Dirk Collier's "The Emperor's Writings" – A Book Review

2011-05-21T17:58:00.009+01:00

With the exception of maybe Emperor Ashoka, no other Indian ruler has achieved as much name and fame as the great Mughal ruler Abu’l Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, more commonly known as Emperor Akbar or Akbar the Great. Akbar’s reign has been chronicled by his court historian Abul Fazal in his works that go by the names Akbarnama and Ain-i-akbari. Other historians, contemporaries of Abul Fazal such as Badayuni, Shaikh Ahmed Sirhindi and Shaikhzada Rashidi, have also written biographies of Akbar. Akbar, in addition to his obvious empire building abilities, was a lover and patron of books and the arts. However, Akbar was most probably dyslexic and could barely write. Therefore, an autobiography of Akbar doesn’t exist. Until now that is. Belgian historian Dirk Collier has written a fictionalised autobiography of Emperor Akbar in the form of a series of letters from Akbar to his son and successor Prince Salim, later to be crowned as Emperor Jahangir.

Abkar’s story, is the story of how a 13 year old boy inherited a shaky and small empire, actually a slim stretch of land along the Yamuna and the Ganges, from his father Humayun who died in a freak accident (falling down the stairs of his library) and who had to fight very hard to hold on to his inheritance immediately after Humayun’s death. It is also the story of a visionary who envisaged a country where his subjects would like in peace and harmony, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Considering the fact that Akbar lived in the 16th century where everyone, Hindus, Shias, Sunnis and Christians, took their religion very seriously, such an aspiration was truly revolutionary. Akbar’s story, as narrated by Collier, can also be construed as a treatise (not unlike Kautilya’s Arthashastra or Sun Tzu’s Art of War) on how to build an empire and how to hold on to it. Most importantly, it a father’s advice to his son who the father thinks is not disciplined enough to inherit his mantle. There are lessons on so many matters which would be of use to his successor, such as how a smaller army could defeat a larger force, how Afghans could be beaten in Afghanistan, how a defeated enemy ought to be treated and the like. It is an entreaty from a father to his wayward son to mend his ways, though Prince Salim has let his father down in the most painful way possible – by having Abul Fazl, Akbar’s trusted friend, the author of Akbarnama, murdered.

Collier has managed to capture in this fictionalised autobiography the spirit of those tumultuous days when the Afghan rulers of Hindustan were being replaced by Turkomen and other Central Asian raiders who traced their lineage to Timur and Ghengis Khan. Descriptions of battles are immaculate and more importantly, not repetitive, though there are many, many battles. Collier has also managed to convey the various facets of Akbar’s personality, his (moderate) love of wine and women, his curiosity to learn new things, ranging from religion (of all hues) and culture to western weaponry. Collier’s language is light and simple and it is a pleasure to read, never dragging at any point, though his tome runs to just over six hundred pages (including tables and annexures).

One of the good things about this fictional autobiography is that certain sections have been narrated by Akbar’s personal physician Hakim Ali Gilani, Akbar’s tutor and friend Mir Abul Latif and his favourite wife Princess Salima. This ensures that the portrait drawn by Collier is not entirely with the same brush.

Towards the middle of the book we hear Abkar tell Prince Salim and his readers that his destiny was to build a united, powerful, invincible Hindustan. After that, once in a while, one finds statements that wouldn’t be out of context even today. When Akbar is desperate for an heir, he goes to Ajmir to seek the blessings of Shaykh Salim Chisti, a descendant of the famous Khwajah Muin-ud-din Muhammad Chisti. Akbar wants his descendant to be ideally born through his favourite wife, Princess Salima, his cousin and widow of Bairam Khan, who is also a descendant of the house of Temur. At that, Shaykh Salim Chisti advises Akbar to make his firstborn ‘a son of Hindustan.’ Shaykh Salim Chisti’s wish is later fulfilled. Prince Salim is born of his Hindu wife, the daughter of Raja Bihari Mal of Amber. When Akbar makes plans to capture Kashmir, he says, ‘Is Kashmir not our natural border? Is it imaginable, is it conceivable that I would leave such an important land in the hands of a foreign ruler? Never! Kashmir belongs to Hindustan; it is mine!’

It is well-known that Akbar’s grandfather Babur did not like Hindustan. Missing his native Samarkhand and Fergana, he laments in Baburnama that “Hindustan is a country of few charms. There are no good-looking people, there is no social intercourse, no receiving or paying of visits, no genius or manners. In its handicrafts there is no form or symmetry, method or quality. There are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or food cooked in the bazaars, no hot baths, no colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks.” Babur always wanted to get back to Samarkhand and re-capture it. He never did. His grandson Akbar on the other hand, made Kabul and Khandahar a part of his empire and was in a position to conquer those Central Asian cities his grandfather yearned for. However, he never did. Collier has Akbar ponder thus. “… I was strongly tempted to march north, to Samarqand – where the bones of our great ancestor Temur the Iron are resting; Samarqand the priceless jewel that was stolen from my grandfather by the Uzbeg usurpers. But then again, I thought to myself: What does this have to do with me? Why should I spend the remaining years of my life in lands where I have never set foot – lands where, reportedly, winters are long and cold, the soil barren, good food scare and the women ugly?”

Collier tells his readers that he has on the whole stuck with the known truth. However, it cannot be denied that, this story, as narrated by Akbar himself, shows Akbar in a very positive light. Was Akbar such a paragon of perfection, one of forced to ask? I am no historian, but I do know from sources such as Wikipedia that Akbar was not so liberal and tolerant of Hinduism and other faiths in his early days. In The Emperor's Writings, Collier shows Akbar in the most favourable light throughout. When Akbar commits a blunder, such as when he sends an inexperienced Raja Birbal, his Wazīr-e Azam (Grand Vizier), to lead a military force into Afghan badlands which gets Birbal killed along with his troops. Akbar concedes that it’s his fault and still smells of roses. However, it can be argued that this fictional autobiography has been written as if by an ageing Akbar towards the last years of his life and his memories are doubtless coloured by his experiences and no longer contain the prejudice of his early days.

Author Dirk Collier is a multi-faceted personality. He serves on the board of Johnson & Johnson in Belgium and a number of other companies. He is also a visiting Professor at the University of Antwerp.