Shah Jahan

Title: Shah Jahan
Author: Fergus Nicoll
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 332
Price: Rupees 899

In Milton’s classic, Paradise Lost, Agra has been revealed to Adam after the Fall as one of the future wonders of God’s creation. This is hardly an exaggeration, during the 17th century, Agra with its 2 million plus inhabitants, dwarfed both London and Paris, in size, in riches and in sheer architectural opulence. The River Yamuna cutting through the heart of the city was lined with a succession of riverside palaces, but the jewel on Agra’s waterfront was clearly the Taj Mahal. Till this day Agra continues to derive its cultural zeitgeist from this mausoleum built in flawless white marble.

The focus of Fergus Nicoll’s book is not the Taj Mahal; it is its creator, Shah Jahan. But when you think of Shah Jahan, the Taj Mahal instinctively comes into your mind. If there is one single achievement that defined the 22-year rule of Shah Jahan, then it is the creation of Taj Mahal. At the height of his power, Shah Jahan controlled much of what is modern India, except the southernmost tip, and the entire Pakistan and Bangladesh. But long after his unimaginable power and riches have faded into the mists of time, the Taj Mahal is the only entity that continues to stands as a testament of his legacy. 

This, in many respects, is a delightful book, lucidly written and brimming over with contagious enthusiasm for its subject, which Fergus Nicoll, a current affairs journalist with the BBC, handles with the aplomb of a practiced historian. Describing the climax of Shah Jahan’s life, Nicoll writes, “Shah Jahan lived on, confined to his tiny quarters over the Yamuna and reduced to a monkish existence, free of status, comfort or wealth, for another seven years. In the women’s quarters across the small complex remaining to him, Jahan-Ara and other ladies eked out a similarly meager life, effectively nuns whose only comfort was religion.” 

Nicoll covers everything, from Shah Jahan’s bloody rise to power, to the nuts and bolts of his administration, the architecture of his palaces and forts, and the disastrous shortsightedness he displayed in managing the destructive ambitions of his sons. The author also shows a keen eye for irony and ridicule, nowhere more in evidence than in the chapter titled, “Like Father, Like Sons”, where he describes the bloody war between Shah Jahan’s four sons. One thing that Shah Jahan was keen to avoid was a war of succession, the like of which had ensued after the death of his own father, Akbar.

Shah Jahan recognized his eldest son, Dara Shikuh as heir very early in his life, but his other sons refused to go by his decision. “Little is known, then, of the atmosphere within the fortress at Agra as Aurangzeb drew near. Shah Jahan, must have been aware of the irony of his predicament: the rebellious son rebelled against, the biter bit.” Aurangzeb managed to usurp power while Shah Jahan was still alive and he unleashed savage vengeance on all his brothers, who had dared to be his rivals to the throne. They were put to death. The fratricidal war between his sons was Shah Jahan’s greatest failure.

The book is quite small in, if you leave the appendix out, the text turns out to be only 248 pages, but what these pages tell us about the life and times of Shah Jahan is actually gripping. The book ends with a sardonic reference to Shah Jahan’s final resting place, the Taj Mahal. “The cascade of mighty titles meant little now, as the corpse of the old man was borne into the white stone enclosure of the illuminated Tomb. But few kings had attained such resting place.” Today Taj Mahal looms as a gigantic cliché to everlasting love, and Shah Jahan is remembered solely for being the creator of this cliché.

The Immortals

Title: The Immortals
Author: Amit Chaudhuri
Publisher: Picador
Pages: 405
Price: Rupees 495

The story is set in Bombay, which is probably a more musical name for the city than Mumbai can ever be. Here is Mallika listening to Motilalji, an accomplished singer, say, “You must practice this song, Mallika! And you have to get the pronunciation right!” Father Apurva Sengupta is a multinational CEO who departs for office everyday looking radiant in his suit and tie. Mother Mallika is a gifted singer with a sublime voice who immerses herself in the world of music. Their son Nirmalya imbibes nostalgic memories of the city, and sets out to discover Indian songs and poets of antiquity, and eventually he loses himself in European philosophy.

Some of the book’s best and most original passages dramatize the appreciation of music as a food for the soul. “Mrs. Sengupta’s voice evoked a ‘golden age’. When people heard it in this drawing room, when they closed their eyes they couldn’t believe it, they felt they’d been transported, somehow, to an earlier, to a better time. Secretly, one or two of them might think the voice ‘old fashioned’; but it wasn’t at all; it was simply out of place in the zeitgeist.”  There is no dearth of lines like the one quoted above that evoke the nostalgic feeling of music that is so past its prime, that it cannot be recovered, if indeed it ever existed.

As Amit Chaudhuri is himself a composer and musician, it is natural for him to excel in the passages devoted to music. The scenes of characters practicing in the privacy of their homes sound quite authentic. It is left to Shyamji, Mrs. Sengupta’s music teacher, who was the son of revered guru Pandit Ram Lal, to bring in a discordant materialistic refrain, “You cannot practice art on an empty stomach.” Observing all this is Nirmalya who has the puritanical zeal of a privileged adolescent, his idealistic mind is filled with the notion that a teacher ought to devote himself seriously to his high calling with no thought of material gain.

Minor characters keep fading in and out of the narrative that mainly rides on the shoulders of Nirmalya, Mallika and Shyamji. Amit Chaudhuri’s portrayal of the attractive but often empty life of corporate executives in pre-boom India is masterful, especially because it manages to avoid the pitfall of moralizing. The novel also charts the growth of a commercial megalopolis – Bombay expands malignantly in the background, its tentacles reaching out to grab every scrap of empty land. In fact, the city growing at a rapacious pace gets figured as a character by the narrative voice.

Ultimately, however, The Immortals is nothing more than a sustained meditation on the relationship of art and commerce. Again and again, it asks whether the two can have any legitimate connection, but it refrains from coming up with simple and clear answers. The theme, explored mainly through the reveries of Nirmalya, could easily have become pregnant with a deeper meaning. But that does not happen, as the young man’s more pretentious thoughts always tend to get deflated.

The Wasted Vigil

Title: The Wasted Vigil
Author: Nadeem Aslam
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Pages: 372
Price: Rupees 425

It is obvious that Nadeem Aslam has overplayed his hand in building up his Afghan tragedy, mainly due to his penchant to give vent to verbal flourish. Consider these lines, where the aftermath of a deadly bombing is being described, “The explosion has created static and a spark leaps from his thumb towards a smoking fragment of metal flying past him. Then he is on the ground. Beside him has landed a child’s wooden leg, in flames, the leather straps burning with different intensity than the wood, than the bright blood-seeping flesh of the severed thigh that is still attached. A woman in a burka on fire crosses his vision.” This is certainly a tragedy that is being described, but it also gives the feeling of an extraordinary amount of verbosity. 

In the end, it is the novel’s deft characterization that makes it somewhat unique. A Briton, a Russian and an American, who by themselves are representative of the three powerful forces of foreign origin that have driven Afghanistan to its current denouement, come together. Neither of them was born in this unfortunate country, but they are wedded to this land by an irreparable sense of loss. Their life has already shattered so completely that they have now realized the futility of even attempting to gather up the pieces. Emasculated by circumstances beyond their control, they can’t even muster the effort to contemplate vengeance on their perceived enemies; all they can do is ruminate silently.

A house, belonging to Marcus Caldwell, a one armed Briton, is inflicted with so many scars that it has started seeming like a microcosm for entire Afghanistan. It is a noisy house, where books, instead of being placed neatly on shelves, often fall down with a thud from the roof. Before the Taliban stoned Marcus’s wife to death, she had been forced to cut off her husband’s hand in front of a crowd at a local stadium. “She was screaming defiance, hurling aside the tray on which there was a butcher’s knife and several glass syringes…” She did what the Mullahs wanted her to do, but went mad in the aftermath and she nailed their extensive book collection to the ceiling.

Then there is the Russian woman, Lara, who has trundled into Afghanistan in search of his brother, who had been a soldier in the Russian army, before he went missing in the 1980s. As the story unfolds, it gets revealed that Lara’s brother had defected from the army, and he intended to join the Afghans in their fight against the Soviets, but he ended up raping a woman, Zameen, who was Marcus’s daughter. From this rape a child is born to Zameen, who survives long enough to meet and fall in love with David, a former CIA operative. But in the tumultuous welter of Afghan society, they get separated and Zameen has to become a prostitute in order to take care of her young son.

The book does suffer from too much symbolism and sentimentality. “When the blade came towards him he stretched his fingers to touch her palm. The last act his hand performed for him.” In the torrent of mellifluously articulated words, the story of real Afghanistan gets diffused, leading to the impression that the plot is contrived and it might not be firmly moored in reality. Then there are the plethoras of dodgy clichés such as – “As though, along with mere bodies, you can bomb ideas out of existence too. They have sent a few arrows towards the sky and think they have killed Allah.” While the agonies of Afghanistan maybe endless, in this book, Nadeem Aslam has not proved himself to be enough of a raconteur who can actually shed light on the pain and the pathos.

Review of Sex and Power

Title: Sex and Power
Author: Rita Banerji
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 415
Price: Rupees 450

From the very onset, Rita Banerji’s book sets out on a rambling excursus into the different epochs of Indian civilization, with the sole purpose of establishing a strong correlation between sexual behavior and political power. The book is divided into five parts, which are representative of the five different eras of Indian civilization. In the beginning there is the Vedic era, where sex is thought to be a sacred duty; after that there is the Buddhist period, when sex gets perceived as a prison; then comes the so-called golden period, when sex becomes concomitant to salvation. In the colonial era sex is thought to be a cause for shame; but in the contemporary democratic era, sex has transmogrified into a paradox.

As the entire history of India gets perceived through the prism of sex, there is a welter of fascinating perspectives. But much of India’s history is still seeped in mythology, and it is difficult for any author to come up with historical facts to prove their points. Mostly they have to rely on allegories. Talking about the Vedic theory of creation, Banerji writes, “Indeed, sex was integral to the Vedics’ own creation theories and the Vedas ascribed the very origin of creation to desire. The One, which was the Vedic religion’s ultimate concept of the Singular Creator, held to be above all the Gods, was the divine figure who first experienced desire. Then desire, personified as a spark, placed a ‘seed of fire’ in the Golden Womb of the Creator, the One.”

Once the Vedic civilization paves way for the Buddhist way of life to take root over most of India, the nature of sexual morality undergoes a sea change. Suddenly sex has become like a bond that keeps human beings moored to the vagaries of a life that is primarily wretched. Banerji finds the Buddhist period utterly bleak, almost as bleak as Gandhian era that would arrive many centuries later and take credit for leading India to freedom. As the degeneration of sex happens in the Buddhist era, it also leads to the lowering in the social status of women. “He reviled women as inferior and lustful. Men, he declared were weak and women were flirtatious and always preoccupied with seducing men and exploiting their weakness.”

When the Buddhist system fades away from the Indian subcontinent, it paves way for a new liberal clime to take root, one that eventually becomes a fountainhead for numerous cave temples adorned with erotic art that continue to exist till this day. Suddenly sexuality turns into a subject of sophisticated and legitimate inquiry.  Banerji begins the third part of the book with these words, “The bleakness of the Buddhist era eventually gave way to a period that raged with fresh and irrepressible energy and it sprung forth such innovative visions of life and art that it is sometimes regarded as the golden period of Indian history.” But while making this sweeping statement, Banerji overlooks the fact that this so-called golden period of history, when sexual freedom was at its peak, left India so weak that it became an easy target for invaders from all over the world.

For some reason the book bundles the Mughal era and the British era of Indian history under the same section titled “The Colonial Period.” As Indian society, which has been cloistered from outside influence for many centuries, is suddenly pitted against foreign ideas coming on back of well-oiled military machines, the socially accepted themes of sexual behavior undergo another round of revolution. The stage becomes set for the advent of a British educated Gandhi who would refurbish the Buddhist idea of sex as a prison. “When he [Gandhi] was told that his experiments were injudicious because as Freud would say, he may have been unconsciously pursuing the very urges that he was trying to repress, Gandhi responded that he knew nothing about Freud.”

The Limits of Influence

Title: The Limits of Influence
Author: Howard B. Schaffer
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 272
Price: Rupees 499

The Limits of Influence contains some interesting vignettes. There are references to Krishna Menon’s quixotic performance at the UN, when he spoke at length for five hours. However, his extraordinary verbosity failed to impress the delegates and few days later they voted 10-0 for the resolution considered to be against Indian interests. When Kennedy was the president and Nehru paid him a visit, the former described it as, “a disaster… the worst head of state visit I have ever had.” Kennedy was peeved by the fact that Nehru remained withdrawn and unresponsive to his probing questions on foreign policy matters and to Kashmir in particular. Then there are the references to the pathetic, euphemistic circumlocutions that Ayub Khan would resort to while pleading his case for a US intervention in Kashmir.

The choice of the title is a clever one, as it predicates the fact that despite being a global superpower there are limits to what the US can achieve. In the span of about 200 pages, Schaffer has tried to delineate the futile attempts that myriad administrations in US have made to find a solution to the Kashmir conundrum. By the time you have turned the book’s final pages, you are just about convinced that there is nothing that US can do to solve the problem. But such a conclusion is not what Schaffer might have in mind when he wrote the book, which ends with the hope that the Obama administration will succeed where the earlier administrations failed. It is also strange that a book on Kashmir has absolutely no inputs from local Kashmiri people, as if their aspirations do not matter.

In fact, Schaffer argues that time is now ripe for a fresh US initiative on Kashmir. “Although the Obama administration should not dispatch a highly publicized special envoy as President Kennedy did in 1962 when he assigned Averell Harriman to the task, a private visit by someone recognized to have the president’s confidence should be considered despite the obvious danger of leaks. The task of acting as the Obama administration’s point persons over the longer term should be given to the resident U.S. ambassadors backed by a carefully chosen team operating in the State Department.” The truth is that Mr. Schaffer is a career diplomat and that is why he thinks that the soothing touch of American diplomacy is good enough to solve almost any intractable problem.

As the narrative plods through the initiatives that various US administrations took during the last 6 decades, you get the feeling of déjà vu, not once, but many times. Not much has changed on the ground, and to a certain extent things have deteriorated. The specter of terrorism raised its ugly head in the late 1980s and took everyone by surprise. It is not as if US was always vigorous in perusing a solution to the Kashmir problem. The policy initiatives have come at erratic intervals and were mostly linked to the US foreign policy interests like containing the erstwhile Soviet Union. This is what Schaffer has to say about the outspoken and domineering intellectual and diplomat, John Kenneth Galbriath, “Galbriath did not believe that a fresh US initiative would serve any purpose. In his view, India was inflexible on the Kashmir issue.”

In other words, Schaffer has written a history of the diplomatic wrangling that went within various US administrations in the name of finding a solution to the Kashmir problem. As it has been pointed at the beginning of the review, the book can best be enjoyed for the vignettes that it contains. Vignettes like the romantic tale of Russell K Haight Jr. an American adventurer who on a whim joined the Pakistani army in order to participate in the first war for Kashmir. He was soon promoted to the post of a brigadier general, but his departure from Pakistan was hastened when he got into a fight with some unruly tribal warriors. However, there is not a single line in this book that can be taken as a possible solution to the Kashmir problem.

Catching Fire

Title: Catching Fire
Author: Suzanne Collins
Publisher: Scholastic
Pages: 391
Price: Rupees 250

Sometimes when you have nothing better to do, then you can try to pastime with some novels meant for young adults. Recently I read Catching Fire. The novel was a good pastime actually, much better stuff than what many of the mature writers are writing. Here is a quick review.

Coming on the tail of chilling, bloody and thoroughly horrifying, The Hunger Games, the sequel, Catching Fire is packed with all the ingredients that make it seem like thrilling roller coaster ride. This book exposes its protagonists to exactly the kind of violence that civilized society wants to shield itself from. But that is precisely the reason why the book turns out to be such a sure-shot page-turner. Catching Fire picks up right where Hunger Games left off. Unrest in the Districts is growing at an alarming pace and Katniss unwittingly finds herself as the figurehead for the new movement against the dreaded Capitol. But with her rebellious performance in the games, she had already angered the dictators who are at the helm of affairs, and a clash seems all but immanent.

Instead of being allowed to enjoy semi-retirement, celebrity status and all that free food, Katniss is drawn back into the arena. In addition to the continuing story of the girl in the ring, “Catching Fire” is a portrait of how a desperate government tries to hold off a revolutionary tide and as such has something of the epic feeling of Orwell to it. Witnessing Katniss and Peeta’s defiance has sparked rebellion in some of the districts and the President of Panem is not happy. He makes it clear that it is Katniss’ responsibility to put a stop to the unrest in the districts by proving her defiance was a result of her love for Peeta and not done to overthrow the government. The freedom fighters in the novel have to face myriad challenges – challenges of conscience, challenges of love, and the challenges of survival.

If anything, Katniss comes out as being much more sophisticated in this book, her observations are more acute. She constantly tries to make a sense of the world around her. She realizes just how difficult it is to kill people, once they become acquainted with you. She is disgusted by the shenanigans of the decadent citizens of the Capitol who gorge on food, before taking pills to make themselves vomit the excess stuff they have swallowed. She is also filled with the realization that she is the woman of destiny and she stands for greater than herself. Undoubtedly, the writer is writing for young people, but the canvas is quite mature, it conjures the vision of a dictatorship as cruel as anything in real world. The narrative is decidedly cold-blooded, as it flies through an emotional landscape peppered with action, romance, horror, hope, despair and, most of all, humanity.

The Rediscovery of India

Title: The Rediscovery of India
Author: Meghnad Desai
Publisher: Allen Lane
Pages: 498
Price: Rupees 699

I read this book few months ago, and I really enjoyed it. Here is my review.

Blame it on Meghnad Desai’s umpteen TV appearances and the resultant celebrity status that the title of his book has now turned into a gigantic cliché. How can this Lord with funny looking hairstyle have the presumptuousness to rediscover India when the country has already been discovered in a book written by India’s tallest leader, Jawaharlal Nehru! The thing is that Rahul Gandhi did try to discover India during his famous “discover India tour.” But his tour was mostly about quality of life in certain rural parts of the country, whereas Meghnad Desai has taken on his shoulders the cumbersome task of tracing the path through which modern India has evolved.

In this country, only political ideologues are expected to show that kind of literary ambition. Meghnad Desai is somewhat non-political, in his TV appearances he prefers to ejaculate sound bytes that are the hallmark of the middle class. Maybe that is why the title of his book has started courting such controversy. There are elitists who can’t tolerate a middle class bourgeoisie showing the temerity of rediscovering the country during the course of a book of 498 pages. If someone from the political class had used this title, then that might not have raised as many eyebrows. However, if you leave the title aside, there is a lot that is of interest in the book.

Meghnad Desai begins with a short preface, in which he discusses his interaction with the book that has had a seminal influence on him. “I read Nehru’s The Discovery of India when in my teens. It gave us the basic story, beautifully recounted by a masterful writer.” A paragraph later in the same preface, he writes, “This seamless story was shattered during the 1950s itself. The agitation for linguistic states took a popular anti-Congress form in Bombay where I was growing up, and we could see that despite Nehru’s reluctance to grant the demands, linguistic states were popular. What followed in 1959 was much more serious. The publication of Maulana Azad’s India Wins Freedom shattered the accepted story of India’s independence.”

It is clear that Desai’s obvious target of attack is Jawaharlal Nehru’s iconic book, The Discovery of India, where its author had portrayed the idea of the Indian nationhood as a seamless evolution over the ages through various cultures and political systems. However, this is only a case of different writers tending to see history through the prism of their own personal experiences and hence reaching completely different conclusions. Desai does not agree that the history of India ended at 1947. In fact, the flow of the narrative in the book is such that 1947 seems like, nothing more than a blip in India’s long history. The story of India still goes on and there are many more good and bad times that people of this country are going to see.

The task that Desai has taken on himself while writing this book is to discover modern India. How did India end up becoming a functioning democracy in a part of world that is infamous for being a playground of military dictators! He seems to be asking this question continuously throughout his book. That is probably why he chooses to name the first chapter as “The Vasco Da Gama Moment.” According to him, more than anything else, it is the arrival of Europeans that has shaped the culture of modern India. Desai tends to dwell on lot of hypothetical situations, where he speculates what could have been the fate of the country had the British not won certain decisive battles. He writes, “Tamil Nadu could have been French speaking and Bengal either Dutch or English speaking. Maharashtra may have been Portuguese speaking…”

The essence of the book is that the Indian nation that exists today is only one of many possible futures, which could have transpired. The element of chance had a big role to play. The borders of any country in the world have never been sacrosanct in history and the same is the case with India. The book is interesting to read and it does offer a different way of looking at our history. Because of its presumptuous title and the celebrity status of its author, it should manage to sell quite a few copies. Good for Meghnad Desai.

A Tale of Two Revolts

Title: A Tale of Two Revolts
Author: Rajmohan Gandhi
Publisher: Penguin
Price: Rupees 599
Pages: 402

The phenomenon of globalisation that is rattling along at an irresistible pace, may get perceived as a relatively recent development in eyes of most people, but the latest book by Rajmohan Gandhi comes out with the startling premise that even in the 1850s era, the world was interconnected and there existed certain tenuous links between the two of the most famous revolts in history - the 1857 Revolt in India and the American Civil War. Mainly by using the mode of biographies, Gandhi manages to summarize the intellectual and social background in Indian subcontinent as well as in the American world, so that we can get a sense of the issues to which the cycle of bloody revolts offered a startlingly new response.

The common link between the two events occurring in far-flung parts of the world was the British Empire. It was the same empire that inspired Indian and American rebels to arise in the name of religion, race and notions of governance. While the Indian uprising evoked significant interest in America, where both sides read it as a confirmation of Indian perfidy, the Indian elite of the time unequivocally supported Abraham Lincoln’s Unionists in their war against slavery. The book begins with William Howard Russell, the first modern war correspondent who was there to cover both the revolts, in India and in US. “We will start this India-England-America story in England in the year 1850, when William Howard Russell, an Irishman uncertain about his Catholicism, but instinctively sympathetic towards the underdog…”

Gandhi resists the temptation of trying to trace the rise and fall of the British Empire. Instead, he focuses on personalities. By using commentary in newspapers and periodicals of that era, he manages to flesh out the cultural zeitgeist that inspired opposition to British rule. Even in an era of imperialism, newspapers in both countries used to carry extensive reports on the conflicts and some columnists managed to draw a link between the American Civil War and India’s cotton exports. According to the author, there was considerable American interest in “India’s 1857 Revolt”; in fact, the situation then was quite the reverse of what it is today when more Indians know about the American Civil War than Americans do about the “sepoy mutiny”.

The most significant message to come out of Gandhi’s book is that 1857 was by no means, India’s first war of independence, as some nationalist historians have preferred to portray it. In that sense India’s 1857 was different from the American Civil War, which was devoted to independence. The 1857 mutiny, in our case, broke out not over a grand issue or contested principle, but over suddenly provoked caste and religious sensitivities: the alleged presence of pig fat in the casing of cartridges used by sepoys in the Indian army. Even if it did bring Hindus and Muslims together against the British, this alliance “seemed to require the glue of rage, and it lacked the promise of permanence”.

Large sections of contemporary Indian opinion opted to side with the British rather than with the rebels because their interests seemed more closely aligned with the former, and neither the dotard Bahadur Shah Zafar, nor the scheming Nanasaheb, inspired confidence as alternatives to British rule. In addition, to Russell’s biography, the book also incorporates the biographies of five different Indians - Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Jyotiba Phule, Ishwarchand Vidyasagar and A.O. Hume. Through these personalities the events leading up to the 1857 uprising get traced and we also come to know about the wider Indian reaction to British rule, the revolt and the nature of social and intellectual exchange between the British and the Indians.

While the enterprise to compare 1857 and the American Civil War is certainly admirable, it also leads to extraordinary juxtapositions, where Abraham Lincoln stands alongside Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and the African-American reformer Frederick Douglass suddenly gives way to the Muslim thinker Sayyed Ahmed Khan. But on the whole, this is a commendable piece of work.

Welcome to the Urban Revolution

Title: Welcome to the Urban Revolution
Author: Jeb Brugmann
Publisher: Harper Litmus
Price: Rupees 399
Pages: 330

One of the principal ironies of globalization is that it is fuelling the growth of urbanization in every part of the world. At some point of time in the year 2007 our planet had hit a major milestone – for the first time in human history majority of the people were living in urban areas. So what does this rush towards urbanization portend for the world civilization. Could it be that mankind might unwittingly find itself consumed by an unending cycle of revolutions? The signs of such revolutions are already apparent in the fact that incumbent governments often get voted out of power.

Jeb Brugmann feels that cities with millions of slum dwellers living in jam-packed surroundings are the fountainhead of revolutions. Dwelling on the volatile urban clime in Africa, he writes, “At current rates, Nairobi alone will have three hundred thousand new slum residents by 2015 and one to two million more by 2030. This pattern is repeated in every Kenyan city. Without a revolution in urban investment and management from above, providing routes to secure tenure, home ownership and small enterprise in the city, there will be more angry rebellion, if not a full-fledged revolution, from below.”

The book theorizes that cities are leading to the overthrow of dictators in every part of the world. He sees a distinctly urban nature in the demise of the Soviet Empire. The civil rights movement in America, the fall of the shah in Iran, and the revolutionary movements in Latin America, all such political developments can be traced to rise of overcrowded cities in these parts of the world. But the truth is that these urban revolutions don’t necessarily lead to a transition to democracy. The Soviet Empire has yielded space not to a liberal democracy but to a hyper-modern version of traditional Russian authoritarianism.

It is interesting to read the book’s take on India’s biggest and probably the most infamous slum, Dharavi. “Dharavi, the bustling, disowned city system of Mumbai, was to be dismantled, rearranged, and rebuilt into… a suburb. I was numbed by what I’d heard.” It is lines like this that make you feel that Brugmann is not much enamored by ideas of modernization. To him a slum looks like an idyllic place only because he tries to look at it through a long distance telescope while being perched in Toronto. For a slum dweller in Dharavi, the crush of people, the lack of sanitation, the stench of industry can hardly lead to conditions that can be remotely idyllic.

But Brugmann argues that a recent plan to tear down Dharavi and rebuild the area into a high-rise residential district runs the risk of disrupting the thousands of subtle, delicate economic relationships that have allowed this slum to thrive. So should Dharavi be allowed to exist forever? What about the aspirations of local Indians who would like to live in some kind of a world-class city.  The biggest drawback in the book is that it fails to deliver concrete pieces of advice for urban planners, other than coming up with vague suggestions that slums should be allowed to exist so that people arriving from rural areas can stay there.

At one place Brugmann ends up comparing Tokyo with Dharavi. “Tokyo’s densely packed areas of mismatched buildings… are slum like in both form and history. The neighborhoods are even somewhat structured like Dharavi…” But he does not bother to identify the factors that make the quality of life in Tokyo feel much better.

The Perfect Dictatorship

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2010 has gone to the Peruvian writer, politician, journalist and essayist, Mario Vargas Llosa.  In 1990, Llosa attended a conference in Mexico entitled, “The 20th Century: The Experience of Freedom.” While addressing the conference, he declared, “Mexico is the perfect dictatorship. The perfect dictatorship is not communism, not the USSR, not Fidel Castro; the perfect dictatorship is Mexico. Because it is a camouflaged dictatorship.”

The thing is that Mexico is not the only perfect dictatorship on this planet. Majority of the nations, even those that masquerade as democracies, are in essence dictatorships. For instance, there is our own country. Are we a real democracy! Or are we just electing dictators who enjoy absolute power for a term of five years. Had we not been a “Perfect Dictatorship” then we would not have had such brazen scams like the 2G and CWG! The leaders live in palatial houses, which have been created by the British raj, while majority of the people live in stinking slums.

India is the ultimate proof of the fact that democracy is a flawed system of governance, because its success depends on the existence of a large pool of enlightened voters. But even if such voters exist, they do so in very small numbers. The electoral arena is left wide open to be captured by the demagogue who is shrewd enough to muster the largest mob of unthinking beings. Our democratic experiment is a miserable failure.  We always elect governments that are corrupt, inefficient and are completely anti-development. Instead of being free, we live under a perfectly totalitarian system.

Day after day we see on TV visuals of lakhs of tons wheat rotting in open, while people starve in the countryside. No one seems to care. Why not completely privatise the public distribution system! Once grain procurement and distribution is privatised, the wastage will stop, and prices will automatically come down. But our leaders are never going to let private entrepreneurs come in. It almost seems as if the real job of the democratically elected governments in India is to ensure that majority of the people exist in complete poverty, while the leaders keep enriching themselves.

Noam Chomsky Exposed in his own book

Title: The Essential Chomsky
Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 515
Price: Rupees 499

The ability to regurgitate non-sequiturs with an easy panache of an armchair activist is essentially the hallmark of Chomsky. During the past four decades he has built a lucrative career by decrying the relatively free economy of his home country, US. It does seem weird to hear this octogenarian intellectual debating whether or not US was to blame for the events of September 11. The truth is that while Chomsky might have contributed a little bit in the so-called linguistic theory, he always gets over the edge when it comes to issues of human rights. Under his tutelage, human rights have morphed into a bizarre entity that like the scarecrow in Wizard of Oz who turns out to be without a brain.

The Essential Chomsky gives an overview of Chomsky’s work; by delving into his political as well as philosophical works, it manages to capture the essence of his ideology. The first three chapters have to do with Chomsky’s pet linguistic project. There is a rather long review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. In the chapter titled “Methodological Preliminaries” Chomsky writes, “Hence, in the technical sense, linguistic theory is mentalistic, since it is concerned with discovering a mental reality underlying actual behavior.” There is no scarcity of intellectuals who are busy gloating over the failure of Chomsky’s linguistic ideas.

In any case, Chomsky stopped being a linguistic theorist many decades ago; these days he is famous only as a firebrand revolutionary. His scathing critiques of U.S. wars in Vietnam, Central America, and the Middle East have furnished a widely accepted intellectual inspiration for antiwar movements over nearly four decades. The Essential Chomsky is full of anti-war articles, as any anthology of his works would essentially have to be. There is the essay titled “The rule of force in International Affairs” in which Chomsky is skewering the US establishment over its role in Vietnam War. In another essay titled, “The Origins of the Special Relationship”, he goes after his favorite whipping boy – Israel.

The problem with Chomsky is that in his eagerness to make a point, he tends to get loose with facts. For example, in his essay titled “The United States and East Timor”, he claims that United States supplied 90 percent of arms used in the conflict, but he does not care to back up his theory with facts. The same essay finds him referring to an “outstanding Australian specialist” on East Timor, who goes on to describe Fretlin, the political party at the time of the invasion, as a fundamentalist Catholic entity. It is quite typical of Chomsky to quote from individuals whom he deems as expert on any subject. But he never cares to clarify the objective criteria for being judged as an expert.

Some of the most readable chapters in the book are those where Chomsky is berating the intellectuals for their pro-establishment stance. He writes, “These examples illustrate the power of the system that manufactures necessary illusions, at least among the educated elites who are the prime targets of propaganda, and its purveyors. It would be difficult to conjure up an achievement that might lie beyond the reach of mechanism of indoctrination that can portray the United States as an innocent victim of Vietnam…” That part about so-called intellectuals being prime targets of propaganda is true, but not essentially in the sense that Chomsky likes to portray it.

More than anything else, Chomsky is an iconoclast. No public figure is sacrosanct for him. He spews as much venom at the conservative leaders as he does on the liberals. He does not mince any words in deploring liberal icons like Carter and Kennedy. He quotes Carter selectively in order to prove that the ex-president continues to be unapologetic about Vietnam War. “By 1977, President Carter was able to explain in a news conference that Americans have no need to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability and do not owe a debt because our intentions were to defend the freedom of South Vietnam.”

The book’s cover page has a comment from India’s own literary rock-star Arundhati Roy. She writes, “Chomsky is one of a small band of individuals fighting a whole industry. And that makes him not only brilliant, but heroic.” It seems that during the last few decades the center of world’s leftist movement has moved from Asia to US. The so-called bastion of capitalism now boasts of the some of the finest leftist intellectuals, Chomsky is just one of them.

Che Guevara literature

The Che Guevara myth refuses to go away. The leftist propaganda machinery has created a big revolutionary halo around this guy. But the truth is that Che was nothing more than a cold-blooded ruthless killer. He killed millions of people in the name of a so-called revolution. He used to derive sadistic pleasure from killing and torturing people.

It is surprising that leftist ideology is still taken seriously  despite the horrible acts committed by the likes of Che. Anyway, it is always the mass murderers who get eulogized by the version of history, which is written by leftist scholars. Just out of curiosity I procured these two books, which give an insight into the mind of this killer. What follows is my review of these two books. I have reviewed them from purely literary point of view. 

Title: The Bolivian Diary
Pages: 303
Title: Reminiscences of The Cuban Revolutionary War
Pages: 314

Author: Ernesto Che Guevara
Price: Rupees 295 
Publisher: Harper Perennial

The popularity of Latin American revolutionaries like Castro and Guevara hinges primarily on the idea that there are hundreds of millions of Latin Americans, most of whom are very hungry, and their hunger is a necessary feature of the political and economic stratagems that make capitalist nations like the USA rich and powerful. In this waking world of hunger, hopelessness and everlasting victim-hood, revolutionary leaders like Guevara and Castro have come to power by promising justice for the dispossessed. They promised to bring freedom and dignity to their people by overthrowing the armed degenerates whose brutality was commensurate to the misery over which they presided. Such are the falsehoods through which leftist revolutionaries come to power!

Ernesto Guevara was, next to Fidel Castro, the most iconic spirit of the Cuban Revolution, both during its military phase and after the overthrow of Batista regime. Has the revolution that Guevara helped to spawn been a success? The answer will depend on your political ideology. Castro continues to be the most popular leader in Latin America and in that sense, the revolution is a success; but the truth is that he has remained in power by crushing democracy, and for people with democratic sensibilities the revolution is a failure. Cubans have been fleeing their country by boatloads and landing where – mostly in USA. Guevara was, among other things, a first-rate writer. The books that he has written give a remarkable insight into the early days of the Cuban revolution.

It is said that Guevara was fearful that the events leading up to the overthrow of Batista regime would be lost in the mists of time, and an important aspect of Latin American history would be gone, therefore he urged leaders of the Revolution to write their reminiscences. Within a year after the triumphal entry into Havana at the beginning of 1959, he had begun to set down the history of the guerrilla war. And he was writing till the day he died at the age of 39 in Bolivia, where he had gone to foment a communist revolution. Two of his books Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War and The Bolivian Diary are a must for anyone interested in the myth of Che Guevara, and in the idea that a small group of determined men can take over an entire country.

Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War gives a remarkable insight into the early days of the revolution when the small band of revolutionaries had to battle for survival on a daily basis. “We walked until darkness made it impossible to go on, and decided to lie down and go to sleep huddled together in a heap. We were starving and thirsty, the mosquitoes adding to our misery. This was our baptism of fire, December 5, 1956, on the outskirts of Niquero. Such was the beginning of forging what would become the Rebel Army.” Stripped of the romantic idealism that gets so easily associated with Che Guevara, the diary is a sobering account of the drudgery, fear and monotony that in totality make up the rigmarole of guerrilla warfare.

First published in Cuba in 1968, The Bolivian Diary is a remarkable and ultimately tragic first-hand account of the disastrous mission that Guevara led in Bolivia. There he made attempts to proselytize the local peasants; there were occasional skirmishes with the Bolivian army, but much of the diary is taken up by the preoccupations of basic survival in the primitive conditions of the Bolivian mountains. On October 7 he made the last entry in the diary, “The 17 of us set out under a slither of a moon; the march was exhausting and we left tracks in the canyon we waked through; there were potato seedbeds irrigated by ditches from the same creek.” Few hours later he would be executed by the Bolivian military.

Max Gunther's 13 ways to get lucky

Always thought other people have all the luck? Well, this is because they understand the difference between luck and planning and know how to place themselves in the path of good fortune. And now, you too can bend the path of luck towards you.

Max Gunther has outlined13 techniques for discovering and taking advantage of life's good breaks in his book 'How to Get Lucky', which has recently been republished after its debut in 1986.Gunther, who died in 1988, said that lucky people arrange their lives in characteristic patterns and tend to position themselves in the path of "onrushing luck".

Here are his 13 tips to turn your luck around:

1. Never confuse luck with planning:
When a desired outcome is brought about by luck, you must acknowledge that fact. If you confuse luck with planning, you will all but guarantee that your luck, in the long run, will be bad.

2. Find the fast flow:
Go where events flow fastest, surround yourself with a churning mass of people and things will happen. It doesn't matter if you are a quiet person; all you need to do is meet a lot of people and let them know who you are. Then they will direct opportunities your way.

3. Take calculated risks:
There are two ways to be an almost sure loser in life. One is to take risks that are out of proportion to the rewards being sought. The other is to take no risks at all. Lucky people, characteristically, avoid both extremes.

4. Know when to cut and run:
Always assume that a run of luck is going to be short, never try to ride a run to its peak. You will virtually always be right as the law of averages is heavily on your side.

5. Know how to select luck:
Is there some likelihood that the problems with your investment - whether it be time, money or love - will go away? Do you have some realistic hope of fixing them? If so, you should stay aboard. If not, you should get out and look for better luck elsewhere.

6. Take the zig zag path:
Despite what many people think the path to success is rarely a straight line. Lucky men and women, on the whole, are not straight-line strugglers. They not only allow themselves to be distracted, they invite distraction.
A plan should be used as a guide only and if something better comes along the plan should be discarded immediately without regret.

7. Supernatural belief can help:
Not because it makes you more lucky but because it helps you make impossible choices. Sometimes there is no rational choice to make, yet the worst reaction is to do nothing.A supernatural belief can enable people to get into a potentially winning position simply by helping them make choices.

8. Be a bit pessimistic:
Lucky people, as a breed, tend to be pessimistic. Optimism means expecting the best, but good luck involves knowing how you will handle the worst.

9. Learn to keep your mouth shut:
Talk can tie you up and lock you in positions that seem right today but may be wrong tomorrow. Avoid unnecessary talk about your problems, plans and feelings. When there is no good reason to say something, say nothing.

10. Recognise a non-lesson:
There are experiences in life that seem to be lessons but aren't. Recognise when something was just bad luck and move on.

11. Accept the universe is unfair:
All of us, the good, the bad and the in-between, are all equally likely to realise our fondest dreams or contract cancer.

12. Be willing to be busy:
The more activities you have going the greater the likelihood that something good will happen.

13. Find a destiny partner:
This is someone who is someone who changes your luck over a long term. This person is not necessarily a romantic partner and is usually just found by blind luck but it can help if you are actively looking.

Raids to nowhere

The raid raj has started and we can hope for another round of entertainment in our TV news programmes. But there is very little hope that these raids will lead to some concrete results. This seems like just another ploy to assuage public opinion. People in this country are too cynical to believe that the government is serious about tackling the issue of corruption. If our parliamentarians had been serious about corruption, then they would have come up with reforms that would take away the discretionary powers being wielded by our ministries. The corruption we see around us is a direct result of discretionary powers vested with the government. Take away the discretionary powers, and the future A Raja’s will have no chance to be corrupt.

The 2G scam has caught the media’s imagination because it was too big and it has been too brazenly executed. But common citizens are not that worried about things like the 2G scam, we are more worried about harassment from petty government officials. Garbage does not get cleared, the roads are a mess, and the officials you have to deal with always turn out to be inefficient and corrupt. This is a strange form of socialism that we practice in this country. What is the government doing to improve the level of governance for the “aam admi?” Just making a big song and dance over few belated raids on A Raja and his cronies does not solve any problem at all. Why not pass a new law that awards “death penalty for the corrupt!” No one likes death penalty, but when the soul of the country is being murdered bit by bit through an endless series of scams, then such measures might become necessary to tackle the rot that has set in.

The government can easily win back its credibility. All it has to do is pass a few reform measures that take away the discretionary powers from the ministries and the various departments. Currently we only seem to be electing dictators for a term of five years. This needs to change. The government needs to be accountable throughout its tenure and not only during the time of elections.

Race of a Lifetime

Title: Race of a Lifetime
Author: John Heilemann & Mark Halperin
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 448
Price: 599


Someone who is a political insider should write this kind of book to expose how our top leaders conduct their electoral campaigns. Race of a Lifetime is very entertaining; almost as good as the story of 2G spectrum scam. Here is my quick review:

This very gossipy chronicle of 2008 elections is absolutely delectable. Chockfull of revelations from the sanctum sanctorum of top ranking politicians, this book is geared to offer a new perspective on the mercenary world of politics.  This is how a snippet on Hillary’s campaign reads – “Clinton turned to two aides she trusted with the most intimate matters, Solis Doyle and Cheryl Mills, and Solis Doyle included Howard Wolfson in the circle. Together, the trio formed a war room within a war room inside Hillaryland, dedicated to managing the threat posed by Bill’s libido.” The racy aspect of the book mainly comes from the fact that there is no mincing of words anywhere; facts get reported in their most undiluted format.

Even the sedate looking Senator Harry Reid gets exposed. Even though he would later say that he was neutral in the presidential race, the truth, the authors write, was like this, “…encouragement of Obama was unequivocal. He was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- a “light-skinned” African American “with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one,” as he said privately.  Reid was convinced, in fact, that Obama’s race would help him more than hurt him in a bid for the Democratic nomination…” After the book was published, the Reid’s comment about Negro dialect made headlines in many media outlets and he was forced to issue an apology.

It is a fast paced book and it reads almost like a thriller, on the wings of which you get transported to a parallel universe, where the politicians get stripped of their hypocritical veil and they appear exactly as they are. The information in the book comes from hundreds of off-the-record interviews, and the whole thing is presented in such a way that America’s most gripping electoral pageant of 2008 reduces to a mischievously gossipy drama. Possibly for reasons of access, the book is not only much stronger on Barack Obama than it is on the luckless John McCain, but a good deal more sympathetic to him. He is portrayed as being too obsessed with winning the race, so much so that he exhibited a Vulcan-like ability to divorce thought from feeling.

There is also the penchant of four letter words that the various protagonists in the novel display. You are left wondering if liberality in usage of four letter words is some sort of qualification that an aspirant for White House must have! The pretty boy of Democratic Party, John Edwards gets hauled over coals, in a literal sense. In passage after passage, he exposed mercilessly, his wife Elizabeth, who had previously been granted a good deal of sympathy, is struck by what feels like a tsunami of oppropribium. A stoic cancer victim who conducted herself with dignity in the face of her husband’s philandering, she is now revealed as being a self-centred harridan. Then there is the over-sexed boy, Bill Clinton. He is easily the biggest casuality in the book, as his numerous philanderings are blamed for his wife’s loss of the White House.

Exposes are a dime a dozen on the McCain-Palin side too. But they are not as interesting as those from those related to the Democratic side of the spectrum. Of course the authors could have done a better job of shedding light on the hidden aspects of Obama’s personality and his campaign, just as they did in case of other candidates. The thing is that even after reading the entire book, which is about the campaign that Obama won, he remains a quintessentially enigmatic figure.

Where is the “real” NDTV 24/7?

Is NDTV slipping! Once upon a time, this channel used to be eulogized as the voice of the middle class, but now it seems to have sold its heart, mind and soul to ruling elite. Its newscasters behave like super-elite maharajas and maharanis; they hobnob with royal lobbyists and ignore issues that many poor Indians are facing. At a time when the entire country is frustrated by the series of scams in which top ministers are allegedly involved, NDTV goes ahead and spends much of the Sunday on a really silly programme called “Tigerthon.”

This show had top celebrities (who live in lavish bungalows hundreds of miles away from any jungle) taking the stage and hectoring us to save the tiger. Does NDTV even realise that today the “aam admi” in India faces more danger, more inconvenience than the “aam tiger.” When will NDTV 24/7 wake up to the cause of the aam admi? Who has the time to worry about the tiger, when our own livelihoods are at stake! This kind of programming is a clear proof of the fact that there exists unimaginable amount of complacency in the top management of NDTV.

This channel has started taking its viewers for granted. Instead of focussing on the real issues plaguing this nation, they are trying to turn public attention elsewhere. Well, one reason why we are unable to save the tigers is because there is too much corruption in the government. Funds meant for safeguarding our forest resources get wasted and stolen by unscrupulous elements. A bunch of celebrities singing in a hypocritical fashion is not going to make an iota of difference to the tigers. We need to change the system of governance, so that the interests of the “aam tiger” as well as the “aam admi” can be safeguarded.

It is time Prannoy Roy woke up from his rather long slumber and took serious look at the kind of news and debate that is being broadcast from his channel. A media organisation’s success does not depend only on its association with politicians, businessmen and lobbyists; it also has to take up issues that are important to large sections of the country. NDTV has completely lost its touch with the masses. The kind of elitism that pours out of this channel is enough to make one feel sick. Case in point is the so-called Tigerthon. It was so completely geared to give you a headache. I could not bear to watch it for more than 30 seconds, before using the remote to move on to some other channel.

Even an honest politician can cause lot of damage

Many times in newspapers and in TV channels I have heard it being said that Jairam Ramesh is impeccably honest minister. Recently when he was in Gujarat, Shri Rahul Gandhi also mentioned Jairam Ramesh as one of those few ministers who were honest. However, as far as I am concerned, I can’t afford to give any such certificate of honesty to Jairam Ramesh. He is too big a minister and I am just a small citizen (aam admi). I have no idea if he lives within his own means, I have no idea how much property he owns, I know virtually nothing about him, except what I read in newspapers and see in TV. So I have simply no way of saying if he is honest or dishonest. But if he can afford to be honest, while being a lifelong backroom player in the cesspool of New Delhi’s politics, then hats off to him. He needs to be congratulated for being a man with “Teflon character.”

However, just because Jairam is not accepting bribes to the tune of 176,000 crore, as one telecom minister allegedly did; just because he does not own flats in Adarsh Society, as many other top politicians of the ruling dispensation do; just because he has not looted the country in the name of CWG, as some highflying leaders have done; it does not mean that he is not capable of misusing power and causing grave damage to this country. Even a so-called squeaky clean and honest minister can have a personal agenda. Recently Jairam Ramesh was at Cancun, to attend the so-called Global Warming summit. There he made the absurd statement that “all countries must take on a binding commitment under an appropriate legal form.” Who gave Jairam Ramesh the right to make this kind of sweeping commitment in name of the entire country? He is not even an elected politician. He is a member of the Rajya Sabha.

It is strange that politicians like Jairam Ramesh go ahead and make sweeping commitments in name of the poor Indians for pleasing the powerful Western elite. He and his politician friends will not have to make an iota of sacrifice, they can continue living in their palatial Lutyen’s Bungalows and enjoy joyrides on chartered planes and helicopters. It is the dirt-poor citizens of this country who will have to give up all dreams of a better future. India needs development. We can’t stop building new infrastructure. Of course, everyone wants to live in a clean and green environment, but it is also true that the industrialized nations like USA have maximum amount of green cover. Some of the most polluted areas in the world are in third world countries, which lack proper industries. Jairam Ramesh might not be corrupt, but he is certainly proving himself to be anti-development. During the recent months, he has brought so many industrial projects in Orissa and Maharashtra to a halt. What criteria does the environment ministry use to decide which projects can continue and which have to halt their operations?

 The workings of the environment ministry under Jairam Ramesh turns out to be shrouded in as much mystery as the workings of the telecom ministry under A Raja. There is no sense of openness or fairness in the decisions and the pronouncements that Jairam Ramesh is making. If Vedanta project in Orissa was bad for the environment, then how come the illegal mining in Karnatka and in other places in the country is good for the environment? For what reasons has the Lavasa project been asked to discontinue operations! Even if you want to build a walking stick, you have to chop down a branch from a tree and that is tampering with the environment. Here we are talking about building large factories and housing projects. Of course, environment will be tampered with when such large-scale development is being envisaged. But that does not mean we should stop all development and go back to the Stone Age.

If our beloved leaders, who are so used living luxuriously in 7-star comfort of taxpayer-funded sprawling bungalows, are so concerned about the environment, then they should try to bring some moderation to their own high-flying lifestyle. For starters, why can’t they move into smaller houses, which consume less electricity!

The Robin Hoods of Indian Socialism

The Socialist motto states, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” But in case of Indian socialism, this motto has been reworked to say, “extract from each common citizen according to his or her ability, to fund the highflying lifestyle of the politicians and their cronies.” The Indian politician is like a modern version of Robin Hood, who rapaciously steals from everyone to fund his own fancy lifestyle, while throwing a few crumbs to his vote-bank in order to ensure political survival. The pro-poor schemes the government initiates only have the effect of increasing poverty. Why should people work for creating infrastructure, when they know that at the end of the day, the powerful political elite is going to usurp their property through taxation or by forcing them to pay bribes.

The worse thing about the multitude of scams that have come into light recently is that the general public does not seem to be worked up with anger. Yes, the opposition parties are crying themselves hoarse, and the media is also taking up the issue in a big way, but what about the general public? We don’t have people protesting in the streets, yet. Most ordinary folks are doing nothing except keeping their eyes glued to their TV screens as the entire corruption drama unfolds like a highly entertaining reality show. Politicians are playing the same role in public imagination that Rakhi Sawant does in her reality shows. The shenanigans of A Raja and Suresh Kalmadi are no less entertaining than that of Rakhi Sawant. If you don’t like to hear about these people, then use the remote, hopefully they will go away.

Many decades ago when the Bofors scandal erupted, the country was truly outraged. But that was the age of innocence. Politicians were still considered to be honest and upright individuals. Today no one expects them to be any better. A Raja and Suresh Kalmadi are the true face of Indian socialism. In a rather cynical sense, they have done a service to the nation by exposing the brazenness with which any deeply entrenched politician can loot the nation’s wealth. India is a third world country, where majority of people earn less than a $1 a day, only because we have opted for a system of socialism that believes in empowering the corrupt few at the cost of majority of the voiceless poor. It is impossible that justice will ever get done in these two cases; we don’t have the political will to punish the powerful.

However, it is not as if the guilty will be totally spared. The punishment will eventually come in the form of loss of reputation. For people like A Raja and Suresh Kalmadi, the loss of reputation should not matter, because they never fight elections in their own. They are only the proxies for some of the top political families in the country. It is these political families, which could see their support base slipping. These elite families, whose main business is political power, have a lot to loose. The “aam admi” might not vote for them next time. No one has been punished for the Bofors scam, and that is why the memories of the scandal refuse to die down. It is still a live issue. The party that had won more than 400 seats has failed to win a majority in every subsequent election in the post Bofors era. It is possible that the Congress’s poor showing in Bihar elections might be linked to the corruption charges the central government is mired in.

For their own good, the top leaders of the regime should now wake up to the reality. Their political future and their entire past legacy is at stake. They must take action against the guilty quickly. No one has the patience for a trail by media that lasts for a decade. The biggest culprit in case of the recent scams is Indian socialism. It has been now decisively proved that this system is prone to misuse and it is anti-poor. Only the richest individuals in the country get houses and spectrum at subsidised rates, the poor are left to fend for themselves. The scams must be taken as an opportunity for cutting down on the powers of the government. Why do we need so many ministers? The country would have been spared the CWG scam and 2G scam if we didn’t have politicians with dictatorial powers over Indian sports and Indian telecom.

Elections are still few years away, but people have already started deciding whom they are going to vote out of power at the next chance they get. The bells have already started tolling to indicate that some highflying political careers are about to end forever. The only way by which the present rulers can ensure their political survival is by cutting down on the powers of the government and by letting ordinary people across the country take charge of managing their own lives.

Simply Fly

Title: Simply Fly
Author: Captain G. R. Gopinath
Publisher: Collins Business
Pages: 380
Price: Rupees 499



With so much to do during the course of any day, it is difficult to find time to read books. I had Simply Fly lying with me for many days, before I decided to give it a try. I was expecting a rather "politically correct" and boring book. But Captain G. R. Gopinath took me completely by surprise. This is one of the best industrialist biographies from India that I have ever read. Very entertaining. Well here is the short review that I wrote for the book:

If you want to know how a boy who once used to ride bullock cart, became India’s most iconic aviation tycoon, this is the book you need to pick up. There were so many transitions in Gopinath’s chequered career, not all of them smooth, but he always managed to emerge a winner. Flipping through the pages of this entertainingly written book, one thing becomes clear - Gopinath is not just an incredible entrepreneur, he is a wonderful raconteur as well. Even when he is describing something as mundane as corporate financing, he does so with the panache of an adventure writer. This is a page-turning memoir, an authoritative business guide and a rousing story, all rolled into one.

Simply Fly is replete with Gopinath’s parables on how he stood up against greed and corruption of the rich and powerful in order to make a way for himself. Even when there is depiction of hardship, the readers get the feeling that there is hope lingering around the corner, and in a matter of few pages, things do take a turn for the better. There is celebration of small-town virtues and boundless love for nature in everything that Captain Gopinath does. Born in a small village near Hubli, to a father who was a schoolteacher, poor in terms of finances and rich in terms of values, Gopinath was barely a teenager when he joined a sainik school and from there he went to the NDA and later graduated as an army officer.

He shares vivid experiences of fighting in the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war. But the straitjacketed lifestyle in the army is not to his liking and after a stint of only 8 years, at the age of 27, he leaves. To the surprise of everyone he chooses to farm the barren jungle land allotted to his family. He writes movingly of his first attempt at farming a piece of land in which 800 coconut saplings, painstakingly planted over 20 acres, were washed away overnight by a stream in spate due to heavy rains. But by the dint of sheer persistence, he manages to make the farm work and yield a small profit. The years to come would see him becoming a motorcycle dealer, hotelier, stockbroker and politician and finally an internationally renowned aviation entrepreneur.

Can you imagine, at one point of time he was even rearing donkeys on his farm. He confesses that due to his sheer “ignorance of donkey psychology” he was confronted with many experiences that might seem hilarious in retrospect, but at that point of time were quite frustrating. The donkeys turned out to be too obsolete to be dealt with. Gopinath succeeded in just about everything he did, except in his role as a politician. He contested elections once and lost by a huge margin. But the most fascinating aspect of the book, one that would be of interest to any budding entrepreneur, is the story of the battle that Gopinath fought to establish his airlines business.

Consider this - he had only 1 crore in his bank account when he managed to order planes worth 1200 crore from Airbus. He even managed to haggle the price of an aircraft from $55 million to $28.5 million. He carried himself with such panache that he could meet the Chief Ministers of states without having an appointment. Then there is the story of why Gopinath sold his airline business to Vijay Mallya. His description of how he and Mallya concluded the deal over one long distance phone call, while the former was ensconced in his luxurious yacht parked in Monte Carlo and the later was in his home in Bangalore, is quite startling. 

Nitin Gadkari has turned out to be a complete disappointment

At a time when every government department is leaking incriminating documents like a faulty municipal tap, and all of us are spellbound by news of scams running into billions of dollars, instead of doing everything to put the regime on the mat, the BJP president is busy throwing a multi-crore party for his son’s wedding. There is no harm in any father getting his son married in style. But Nitin Gadkari is not an ordinary father. He is the BJP president, and he is expected to lead by example. Why couldn’t he have married his son in a more sober and decent manner! BJP and the entire Sangh Parivar never tire of talking about the virtues of simple living, and the tallest leader in their party goes ahead and splurges who knows how many crores of rupees! What hypocrisy!

The problem with BJP is that this organisation never learns from history. There exist so many examples of politicians who have lost elections after conducting rather ostentatious weddings for their children. Case in point is Lalu Prasad Yadav. The way he misused the government machinery at the time of his daughter’s marriage was insulting to all Biharis. Why should a senior BJP leader have such a lavish ceremony for his son’s marriage? This only goes to show that Nitin Gadkari is out of touch with reality. He is as much cut off from real India, as many leaders of the Congress Party are. He has no idea that people are disgusted by the fact that many of our politicians live more ostentatiously (even though they have no valid source of income) than even Bollywood film stars. If Nitin Gadkari wants to emulate the lifestyle of Bollywood star, then he should have joined Bollywood instead of politics. Everyone knows that he can sing very well.

Had he gone in for a simple ceremony for his son’s marriage, he would have set an example and he would have endeared himself to a large section of the country. Indians are instinctively drawn towards people who are simple and sober. But now this opportunity is lost. Nitin Gadkari has proved himself to be like an out of touch “super-rich” politician, who has an ego of the size of a jumbo jet. According to some TV reports, the entire city of Nagpur was decorated for the wedding. Politicians, businessmen, Bollywood personalities and celebrities arrived in chartered planes. Who paid for these flights? Who paid for the security arrangements, for the decorations, the food that was served to more than one lakh guests, and for everything else!

If the president of a political party can create this kind of an extravaganza at a time when the focus of the entire country is on the issue of political corruption, then there must be something seriously wrong with the party’s culture! Maybe BJP is as morally corroded as Congress is. There could be more A Rajas’ and Kalmadis’ in BJP, than there are in the Congress. There is no guarantee that had the BJP been in power, the 2G scam would not have happened. Then instead of BJP creating a logjam in parliament, the Congress would have taken the high moral ground. It is time BJP leaders like Nitin Gadkari had a reality check. Just because they have won in Bihar, they should not start deluding themselves that they are all set to become the rulers of the universe, and they can start throwing mega-parties for every wedding in their family.

Now it is crystal clear that Nitin Gadkari is not only addicted to a luxurious lifestyle, he is also soft on corruption. He has already allowed the Karnataka chief minister to stay on in power. Few weeks ago when CWG scam was a big issue, Nitin Gadkari held a press conference, where he said that he had a large amount of information on corrupt deals of the UPA, which he would release from time to time. But if he already has the information, why not release it at one go. Why is he interested in releasing the information in small drips! His focus is only on keeping the issue of corruption warm till the next election; he is not interested in reforming the system of governance. He is not a mass leader; he is only a champion player of “political chess.”

Most people in the country are still not convinced that BJP can be trusted with power at the centre. With his luxurious and expensive lifestyle, Nitin Gadkari has only managed to cast further doubts into the minds of the people. We have the right to ask – why not have a JPC into the high profile marriage ceremonies that politicians organise every now and then? At times entire city is held to ransom in such parties – the roads are blocked due to security reasons and there are all kinds of inconveniences heaped on ordinary citizens, while the politicians and celebrities hobnob with each other and have a good time. The tragedy for this country is that in a deeper fundamental sense, there is hardly any difference between the Congress, the BJP and every other regional party.

Politicians have brought discredit to profession of politics

India today is a much better country than it was about two decades ago, but the reputation of the politicians has gone worse. Till about two decades ago, Indians used to worship their leaders, today we hate them bitterly. The notion that “sab choor hain” may not really be true (there could be many honest people in politics), but it has certainly captured the popular imagination. So what has gone wrong with the profession of politics? Obviously, one major problem is that politics has ceased to be a mass movement. Contemporary politics has become an elitist phenomenon. Even though country is still a democracy, political power is acquired by paying obeisance to few powerful families and by managing alliances. The leaders, who rule from New Delhi, live behind an impregnable wall of sycophants, and they have lost all connection with the country.

Some top leaders are so disconnected that the only view they have of the nation comes from what they can see from the glass windows of their helicopters flying few hundred feet in the air. From that height people must look like ants and that is why leaders in New Delhi usually behave as if their job is to manage the affairs of a gigantic ant colony. So there is disconnect between the aspirations of the voters and the agenda of the leaders. This is the disconnect that leads to the feelings of mutual contempt. While the leaders think of the people as meaningless ants, the citizenry retaliates by expressing the equally absurd idea that all politicians are thieves – “sab choor hain.” This kind antagonism between the people and the politicians is bad for Indian democracy. But the ball is in the political court, it is they who have to take the initiative to improve their image.

Everyday a new scam breaks out in the country. What initiative is the political leadership taking to ensure that the looters are punished, and we don’t have any scams in future! When politicians appear on TV, all we get to hear is age-old clichés, which no one believes in any more. The powerful elite in he country has decided to close their eyes to the realities of changing India, they think that they don’t need to take the entire country along, that they can continue to remain in power only by making the right kind of alliances with regional satraps. But there always comes a time when old ideas stop working completely. There is also the fact that when the central leaders start depending too much on regional satraps, then they might become powerless to do anything about the most blatant cases of corruption. For instance, there is the 2G scam!

The levels of corruption is not just disgusting, it is also frightening. Why do these people need to make in such obscene amounts of money? 176,000 crore! Will they carry the money with them when they die? The regime owes an explanation to the people. This is not the medieval era when the king could get away with anything. Instead of addressing the issue, the regime is trying its best to brazen it out. The political elite has no intention of nailing the corrupt; they only wish to maintain their power by keeping their alliances intact. This kind of absurd and atrocious behaviour is leading to the great disconnect between the electorate and the elected. Politicians are no longer leading the nation; they are only devoted to serving their own agenda. Politicians versus rest of the country – this kind of scenario is not good for democracy, but it is today’s reality.

Brazen cases of corruption in high places can in extreme cases lead to a revolution. The entire political system could change in a matter of few years, but that may or may not be in best interests of everyone. After all, there is no guarantee that a revolution will lead to a better regime in power. So in order to avoid further disenchantment in the population, the powerful elite must get its act together. There should be an action against the corrupt, and there should also be reform measures that can improve the quality of life. Prices have risen beyond imagination, while the salaries continue to stagnate. The pace at which new infrastructure is being developed is too slow. Who is responsible for this kind of absurd situation? Obviously the regime that is in power, they are so busy protecting the scam-tainted ministers that they have no time to provide governance to the country.

The Buck Stops in my Pocket!

The one big mistake that Niira Radia and other power brokers operating out of Delhi made is that they did not take the Internet into account. They did try their best to manage some senior journalists and media organisations, but these days news does not remain the monopoly of few business houses. Stories can go viral on the Internet in no time. Finally Barkha Dutt decided to take the bull by the horns and confront some senior journalists, including Manu Joseph, in a show telecast at 10 PM on November 30 on NDTV. This time round it was she who was on the hot seat, being grilled by senior journalists - Dilip Padgaonkar, Sanjay Baru, Manu Joseph and Swapan Dasgupta. It is a great thing that she and NDTV have finally decided to confront this issue. But why wait for more than 2 years? The existence of these tapes has been known for so long.

Barkha Dutt began by politely and honestly accepting that the conversations that she had with the ace power broker Niira Radia were an “error of judgment.” But why should we accept her error of judgement theory. If someone else had been in her situation, she would have treated the episode as “Breaking News.” Anyway, she empathically denied that she was part of the Niira Radia’s inner circle. Unfortunately, Manu Joseph was not allowed to speak at length; there was too much antagonism between him and Barkha. Swapan Dasgupta made a very interesting point – he talked about certain journalists being openly close to certain political formations, he went to the extent of confessing that he was considered to be close to the BJP and then he asked Barkha if she enjoyed a similar cosy relationship with Congress. Because in the tapes she has told Radia that she would speak to certain leaders of the Congress Party.

At first, Barkha seemed perturbed by the question, but she managed to offer some kind of clarification. She said that Radia was an important source for her, and she was only trying to humour the source. If Barkha is to be believed she was only trying to cast a false impression before Radia that she had the power to influence the top decision makers in the government. She was fibbing, while performing the journalistic duty of prying Radia for information about what was actually going on in the corridors of power in Delhi. But if that is the case, then why haven’t we had more exposes regarding 2G scam and CWG scam in NDTV. During the last few months, Times Now, Headlines Today and CNN IBN have done most of the exposes on corruption. There was a time when NDTV used to be the best English news channel in the country, but now their coverage is complacent.

It is also strange that Barkha Dutt was trying to accuse Manu Joseph for publishing the transcripts of the conversation between her and Radia in Open magazine. She repeatedly questioned the ethics of publishing “raw” transcripts, selectively. Joseph was never allowed the chance to fully answer this charge. What ethics is she talking about! Open magazine only published transcripts of tapes that were not being reported in the mainstream media for more than two years. The sad thing is that despite having herself quizzed by a panel of journalists Barkha has not able to allay the myriad suspicions. Doubts continue to linger; cynicism is a state of mind in this country now. Corruption is the biggest issue facing the nation. Majority of the politicians and bureaucrats are honest. But they are unable to do anything to stop the loot that is going on. Corruption is not about people and personalities; it is about the system.

In our socialist system, the government enjoys immense amount of power to pass arbitrary judgements and that is what is leading to corruption. If we can take away from the government the power to take economic decisions, then corruption will go away automatically.