john cheeran

Sphere of Influence by Gideon Haigh: A Review

2011-12-03T20:15:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
What do you write, when you write on cricket? You write about riveting games, entertaining characters, game’s fault lines, leave out the scoreboard but paint the big picture.
Gideon Haigh, the Australian cricket writer, has put together a collection of writings on cricket and its discontents – Sphere of Influence. Simon and Schuster India has published the book. So, who will be interested in reading the stuff?
The book suffers from the fact that there are hardly any new essays in this. Much of what figures here have been published by www.cricinfo.com and easily trawled on the Internet. And most of the other observations published elsewhere are dated. Haigh is not a stylist so that one can return to this collection and savour it in bits and pieces.
There is nothing new now when you say that India is the new power centre in world cricket and the white half of the sphere of influence does not relish this change. We all know that.
Followers of the game in the subcontinent would relish the portraits of Javed Miandad, Mutttaiah Muralitharan, Kapil Dev and Sachin Tendulkar that feature in the Giants of Asia section. Again, all are taken from Haigh’s scrapbook.
On the brighter side, Haigh raises some interesting questions such as how to save one-day internationals. He would like to rename ODIs as one-day Tests: limited overs, unlimited in scope. Captains would be free to use bowlers when and as often as they wished, and place fielders anywhere they pleased, with a limitation only on boundary riders in the last five overs.
But Haigh rightly points out that such suggestions would not be appreciated by the International Cricket Council. He writes: ”The idea of making anything look more like Test cricket is simply too counterintuitive for cricket’s governing classes.”
And in another essay, A Modest Proposal, Haigh wants the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) to cede control over the IPL and the Champions Trophy to the ICC so that the traditional monopoly of the official game is restored. Would that proposal come about had the Australian Cricket Board invented an APL and turned it to a success story?
Certainly, we are going to miss Peter Roebuck.

Title: Sphere of Influence
Author: Gideon Haigh
Publisher: Simon & Schuster India
Price: 399

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson: A Review

2011-12-03T17:04:00.006+05:30

By John Cheeran
Steve Jobs believed that people do judge a book by its cover. So it is not surprising that the cover of Jobs’s biography, aptly titled Steve Jobs, has a black and white picture of him, looking at you intently, and unblinking.
Great men inspire great biographies. Steve Jobs, the man who founded Apple Computers and agonized over his products in a maddening way, never left anything unattended. Jobs was a man of control. Ask Bill Gates. Then, ask Apple lovers. Whether it is a design detail or having his version of the world, Jobs planned and demanded the best. In Walter Isaacson, former chairman of the CNN and managing editor of Time magazine, Jobs found the right man to put together his life story. But be warned, this is hardly a paid job.
Unlike many of us Jobs knew a lot of things. Such as that he was nearing death and had to rush through whatever he wanted to do in the extra time he had been given. Result is the biography, Steve Jobs. Jobs’s world view was often, nay, almost black and white. In colour, too, he preferred black and white as the cover of the biography testifies. The pictures included in the book, all, again in black and white, convey the colourful nature of Jobs’s personality. He yielded against his will rarely, as when U2’s Bono asked for a special ipod edition in black.
Unlike many of us Jobs did not know many things. Such as who his father was. Jobs had an amazing life, a life that would have been almost impossible in India. He was put up for adoption by his biological parents and Jobs did not know for many years who was his father. The sense of abandonment shaped his life to a certain extent. As much as iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad were American, Jobs, too, was truly American. Circumstances did not deter him and he had the ability to push the envelope all the time. In this, the reality distortion field, did the trick. Only Jobs could have been demanding to a frustrating extent and get what he wanted from his people. Jobs founded Apple in 1976. He was 21. At 19, Jobs spent seven months in India in search of a guru. What have you been doing when you were 19 and 21?
I’m not a digital citizen. Nor am I an iPhone or iPad user. But to read how Jobs built the Apple and pushed boundaries in his quest for innovation is an exciting and enlightening experience.
Jobs was a difficult man to work with and live with. Both the dissembling and the truth-telling were simply different aspects of his Nietzschean attitude that ordinary rules did not apply to him, notes biographer Isaacson who has also authored the biographies of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin.
To many of us, Apple represented the acme of consumerism. Then you read Jobs telling his girlfriend Egan Jennifer that it is important to avoid attachment to material objects. “Our consumer desires are unhealthy, he told her, and to attain enlightenment you need to develop a life of nonattachment and non materialism. Wasn’t he defying that philosophy, Egan asked, by making computers and other products that people coveted?”
Isaacson writes: ”Throughout his career, Jobs liked to see himself as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness.”
With the publication of the biography, many things such as Jobs’s refusal to take treatment for his cancer and his obsession with his fruity diet are quite well known now. One thing, however, you should not miss is Jobs’s reflection on his legacy, in his own words. In it Jobs says:”People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read that are not on the page.”
That’s something that you can chew on.

Title: Steve Jobs
Author: Walter Isaacson
Publisher: Little, Brown, (in India) Hachette, India
Price: Rs 799

The Curse of Mukada (Monkey Magic series): A Review

2011-10-28T14:27:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran

The Curse of Mukada, the first book in the Monkey Magic series is a story about our closest relatives. As 11-year-old Romy’s father Dr Jeremy tells her, apes and monkeys need to be protected from their close relatives. You and me, that is.
It is more than a story – Grant S Clark’s book carries a powerful message for young readers, urging them to be environmentally conscious, wherever they are. In The Curse of Mukada Dr Jeremy sets out to find out why orang-utans (man of the forest) were behaving strangely at the Mukada Nature Reserve in the rainforest island of Borneo in southeast Asia. All of a sudden orang-utans were migrating to the coast, an area they normally avoided and that was home to proboscis monkeys. The proboscis didn’t enjoy orang-utans poking their noses around and the orang-utans were falling sick in the new terrain.
Is Mukada’s Curse the reason why orang-utans are dying now? According to the lore, an orang-utan saved the whole Mukada village except a boy from a huge fire, years ago. But the family that lost its child in the fire cursed the orang-utan for not saving the boy. Romy has been told that orang-utans are dying since then.
Although Dr Jeremy brought Romy along to his mission to Mukada, she expected only to watch her father at work. But Clark wins young readers over by pitting the 11-year-old girl against the dark forces that operate at the forest.
It’s Romy’s adventure that holds together the slim narrative. She makes friends with the orang-utan clan, and manages to exorcize the curse, and your jaw may drop when you find out who are the villains.

Title: The Curse of Mukada
Author: Grant S Clark
Publisher: Hachette India
Price: Rs 175

Tiger’s legend will live on

2011-09-22T22:09:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
Tiger Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi was born a prince but unlike the maharajas before him, he brought to Indian cricket an egalitarian attitude, unparalleled in the nation’s sporting history. Tiger wanted every player to give his best on the field.
He placed a premium on fielding excellence, a still neglected as aspect of the Indian game, and wrote in his famous autobiography, Tiger’s Tale, that in his team there would not be any place for a player however great he is but sloppy on the field.
Pataudi was a no-nonsense man. On a few occasions when one spoke to get his reactions on matters of cricket, his gruff voice over telephone conveyed his imperial manner that upset the officialdom in Indian cricket many a time. Vijay Merchant, the illustrious batsman from Bombay, when he was chairman of the selection committee, used his casting vote to deny Tiger a place in the side. Pataudi was recalled later to lead India against the West Indies in the 1974-75 home series, a series that galvanised Indian cricket. India, after losing the first two Tests, did the unimaginable against the mighty West Indians, by winning the next two.
In Pataudi, India had its finest leader of men (he led India in 40 Tests), till the advent of Sourav Ganguly and Mahinder Singh Dhoni clouded people’s judgments. Tiger’s daring was total in that he contested Lok Sabha elections in 1971 protesting against the abolition of privy-purse. Pataudi only scored 2793 runs in 46 Tests, a number that looks quite ordinary in contemporary cricket, but many still wonder how many more he would have scored if he had not injured his right eye early in his career.
(Tiger died in Delhi at the age of 70 on Thursday. He was suffering from lung disease.)

Why Dravid is not a one-day wonder but stay with us forever

2011-09-16T21:56:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
Rahul Dravid, by any reckoning, is not a quitter.
But this Friday is different. Dravid, who never shied away from taking harsh and hard decisions on the field, is playing his last one-day international. India and the rest of the world will be watching for the last time a Dravid draped in colour blue. Champions of the world may not care. MS Dhoni may not care. Brand managers won’t cry. Dravid’s departure from one-day theatre cannot be quantified in terms of the thrills he offered.
He brought to batting crease an approach that was rooted in fundamentals. Never in a hurry, but always alive to the urgencies of the limited over cricket, Dravid lent his broad bat and battered body to Team India’s cause. But, finally, in the rush hour of T20, he was reduced to a loner by a selection committee that had got its priorities absolutely wrong.
After watching Dravid at 38 in England during the Test series, who would not ask Krishnamachari Srikkanth why the batsman was left out from the World Cup squad. Srikkanth could afford to look over Dravid since the World Cup was being held in the sub-continent where flat-track bullies reigned. And what made the same selection committee to recall him?
Many thought Dravid would quit international cricket all together after the England tour. The thought was not out of place especially after Dravid dazzled us with one Test century after another as India plumbed newer depths. This is the time to go. But Dravid has decided to stay back and leave at the same time, surprising yet again with his tenacity and hunger to prove detractors wrong. Dravid was a broken man after Indians immolated themselves in the Caribbean World Cup, in a bid to put Greg Chappell in his place. Dravid then had a lean patch and many wolves had wanted him to accompany Sourav Ganguly to the pavilion. But, then, Dravid believes in himself. Only he knows. Only he knows when to call it quits.

Summer of 2011: Time for Rahul Dravid to bid farewell

2011-07-12T20:38:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
After the triumph in 2011 World Cup not many would have taken India’s tour to the West Indies seriously. The Indian squad itself was depleted, without Sachin Tendulkar and Virender Sehwag.
India, however, did well both in the one-day and Test series. Yes, India did not show enough aggression, especially by not going for the kill during the second innings chase on the final day of the third Test. And skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni has been flayed by many critics for his pussyfooted approach to the end-game.
Am I disappointed? Yes and No. Yes, because it was an opportunity that we did not reach out for. No, considering the overall outcome of the series. It is, however, important to realize that India still depends on seniors such as Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman to steady its ship in the choppy waters of Test cricket. It was a joy and relief to watch Dravid play another match-winning innings (112) in the second innings of the first Test at Sabina Park, Kingston. But, then, Dravid has given his best with India in a crisis. Statistics would show that he has performed on a higher plane away from home. But Dravid is not your man to bet on a situation that borders on gambling as was in the final Test. The classicist that he is, Dravid reiterated his relevance on a cricketscape awash in young dreams.
But there are other things that Dravid has to remember at this age and stage of his career. This is the time to go. The tour to England is a great opportunity for Dravid to put full stop to his splendid career.
Dravid has had his run, after all. Yes, he is fit, and good enough for another 12 months of Test cricket. I hope he remains hungry for success in fields other than cricket too.
But the memory I have of him during India’s last Test series win in England in 2007 was that of a Dravid struggling at Kennington Oval to ensure that nothing goes amiss during India’s second innings, despite a first innings lead of 319 runs. Dravid, after India lost its first three wickets – Wasim Jaffer, Dinesh Karthik and Sachin Tendulkar – for 11 runs, would have been troubled by the memories of the World Cup disaster, and pottered around for 140 minutes for 12 runs. It was not a pretty sight.
Dravid, at 38, is still capable of producing big knocks. He began his Test career in England, and he is more of an English cricketer than an oriental hero. There cannot be a better place for Rahul Dravid to bid adieu than England. I wish he relives the summer of 1996, and walks off to the pavilion, making India asking for more and why.
At that time, Dravid would not be the highest run-getter or the scorer of maximum number of centuries but none will doubt that he gave all he had to India’s cause at the cricket pitch.

River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh: A Review

2011-07-11T21:15:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
Amitav Ghosh is a highly persuasive writer. Unhurried narrative and an eye for detail make him compelling reading. The second of his Ibis trilogy, The River of Smoke, is a long novel at 535 pages but Ghosh succeeds in taking you along the voyage and the slow unfolding of the standoff in Canton between Chinese authorities and an assorted group of merchants who swear by the supremacy of free trade at any cost.
The River of Smoke fills in you with the buildup towards the first opium war between Britain and China in 1839. China had an ambivalent policy towards opium trading in Canton, encouraging British and Indian merchants to operate in connivance with a section of Chinese traders. When the emperor realised that drug addiction was reducing his subjects into zombies he wanted to bring in import restrictions. It threatened the existing commercial relationship between Britain and China.
But what sustains the interest of the reader is the story of Bahram Seth, the Parsi trader, who has taken the biggest gamble at a now-or-never moment in his life to take a huge cargo of opium to Canton. Bahram has been trading in opium with Canton merchants for long, he is familiar with the tics and twitches in the Chinese system and has a yen for making money. But this voyage in 1839 from Bombay to Canton was against heavy odds, starting from the ominous signs at his home and entreaties of his wife Shireenbai, then the storm that destroys the figurehead of his ship Anahita and loss of a large chunk of the cargo.
Though another ship – Redruth, carrying plants and flowers—is there in the sea, it is only to illustrate the unfolding Canton picture.
Yes, Ghosh persuades you to take a stand against the profiteering spirit of English traders in Canton but it is the fate of Bahram Seth that keeps you turning the pages. Bahram, too, is in league with British traders but by painting a fuller picture of the Parsi merchant --his relationship with a Chinese boatwoman and a son he cannot acknowledge in public and the machinations of his brothers-in-law back in Bombay --- you are made to empathize with him. Bahram wants to sell this load of opium at any cost even though he admits to himself that he has sold himself to Ahriman by doing something that is now declared illegal by the Chinese authorities and new commissioner Lin.
With no prospect of selling his cargo and commissioner Lin making plans to destroy the whole load of opium, with little hope to rebuild his life, Bahram muses while watching his nephew playing cricket at the maidan in Fanqui Town. “Will they remember that it was the money we made here, the lessons we learnt and the things we saw that made it all possible? Will they remember that their future was bought at the price of millions of Chinese lives?... Was it just for this: so that these fellows could speak English, and wear hats and trousers, and play cricket?”
Sea of Poppies did not have a heroic, tragic figure as its mast and that did take away the emotional frisson from it. In River of Smoke, long after the siege of Canton was resolved, Bahram refuses to leave you. He lets you drown in a river of smoke.

An Interview With Arjun Shekhar, author of A Flawed God

2011-06-27T20:39:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
A Flawed God – what’s your central concern in the novel?
The main idea was to bring the point of ownership across to people. I believe ownership of common spaces has been abandoned by humans in a rush towards individual uniqueness and concern. For elaborating this premise, I set the tale in the corporate sector because it is very influential in our individual decisions and in political, and community decision making as well. In turn, the corporate sector is controlled/ directed/ designed by the share market. Because of the huge unseen power that the share market wields upon the existence of humanity (present and future), I call it our new God. And in the way it creates owners sans ownership through its algorithm of speculative investment, I believe shareholders have been forced to become punters rather than owners, people who will never set foot in the company they own and yet are keen to profit from the relationship.
Thus I feel that there is a case for ownership of assets being divorced from psychological ownership of the firm. When the latter is handed over to the people who live in the space as a community and make meaning out of it, then the decision making will surely improve in the firm and thus the flaw shall iron itself out. I believe the most brutal thing humanity has done is to snatch a decision away from its rightful owner; my central concern in the book is to ask for it to be returned to them, an act that will benefit everybody in the short, medium and long run. Many examples of this can be seen in practice - Kannan Devan Tea Estates (S. India), Mondregon Cooperative (Basque country, Spain), Lijjat Papad.

Who’s your audience? Is A Flawed God for meant for the professional, corporate class?
Since the book talks about ownership, I believe the audience could be anybody and indeed I hope to reach to the mainstream non-corporate public too -- people who don't know how silently the corporate world is taking over their lives. For instance, my mom who is an enlightened housewife has found the book very interesting as have a number of non-government organization folks.
As is feedback from corporate sector executives. The massive number of the young corporate workforce would certainly relate and connect immediately to the book, which is why events are slated at many business institutes in the next month to dialog about the concepts presented in the book. I believe any reform has to come from inside and no amount of watchdog or policing from the outside can change anything. Gorbachev did it to communism from inside and so it will be for capitalism too. A movement to make capitalism more accountable is slowly and steadily taking shape in the US shepherded by the Conscious Capitalism Institute set up by a business professor and writer from Boston.

You are discussing ownership rights in corporate sector with an HR perspective. Aren’t you? The argument that stock market is a flawed god, the way you have presented, is that convincing enough?
It is possible that the argument needs more bolstering but then remember I was writing a fun, racy novel because I wanted to get through to an essentially young audience who don't necessarily want to read boring, heavy texts and switch off immediately they hear the word share market. Tell me, when has the share market been brought to the attention of so many people in such a fun way. I have tried to take a serious topic without taking myself too seriously. That was my brief for myself when I started writing - the book must be a novel first and foremost, the messaging will only be a subtext.
The yo yo-ing of the Sensex since January will itself bring home to you the volatile nature of this market and how dangerous it is to let this rule our lives and not even know about it. So much money has been made (and lost) by "owners" of companies in the last six months; it looks completely chaotic from the outside but the insider waits like a hawk to make money from the bull and bear runs that seem to be happening so frequently like there was a tug of war on between the two. The shareholders are enjoying this buy-sell game and the only people being pulled in every possible direction are the staff and the blinkered public.

Sanchit’s Turkey sojourn and the Collective do not have any impact on the novel or even on the argument of a flawed god? Don’t you think the larger puzzle you have tried to offer to readers has not fallen into place?
I used Turkey setting to create the sense of mystery that pulls readers in. Many writers have used this device before. It’s a narrative ploy where the flashbacks set the context for the puzzle even as the protagonist's journey intrigues and keeps the reader's attention; without it I wouldn't have been able to talk about an essentially boring subject - economics and the share market - to a mainstream audience. Your question seems to pass a judgment that a large number of readers don't seem to have come to. Rather the opposite, and here again I nudge you gently towards the Facebook page of the book, where a deluge of reader comments tell me that indeed the puzzle has fallen into place for them. Two things happen by the time you finish the book - one, you agree that the shareholder as owner is a flawed concept and two the reader's curiosity of what is the alternative gets satisfied when the frontline parliament demonstrates how the staff can be persuaded to take on the psychological ownership of the firm and save it from ruin.

A Flawed God by Arjun Shekhar: A Review

2011-06-27T20:38:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
Arjun Shekhar has a lot to tell. Shekhar has tried to think for himself and the result is his debut novel A Flawed God. It’s an effort to be bold and present an alternative vision for corporate world but it runs the risk of being branded as a naïve outlook.
Shekhar must have read a few recipes on how to write a page-turner but I should say that it does not leave me asking for more. In fact it only gives me a queasy feeling. A Flawed God begins on a promising note, with the protagonist Sanchit Mishra embarking on an ‘HR’ adventure to Turkey. A bit of research would not stand in for a well-crafted plot and convincing character sketches. In Shekhar’s book stock market is the flawed god. It raises some moot points about ownership rights in corporate sector but not even Karl Marx would have been impressed with Shekhar’s theory. Well, it’s fiction but what about conviction?
Shekhar has had his time in human resources (a concept which I can’t figure out after having worked in India and the Middle East for reasonable stretch of time) and attempted to capture the angst of corporate workforce. But the intrigue, mystery, rivalry, politics and envelope-pushing do not come through these pages.
Pause the femme fatal is playing a game at Frozen Air with Sanchit as her pawn. It’s a game that risks their future as well as that of the company’s with the Sanchit having a series of self-discoveries in the process. Pause is the button that controls the events in A Flawed God. There is, of course, the customary heartbreak with Lokesh the loquacious wasting away himself at a sanatorium.

Adapt (Why Success Always Starts With Failure) by Tim Harford: A Review

2011-06-02T22:49:00.003+05:30

By John Cheeran
Tim Harford, the undercover economist, has come up with another book of brilliance – Adapt (Why Success Always Starts With Failure). Harford is a renowned economist and a journalist with Financial Times and while his revelation about the importance of adapting in social and corporate life is hardly original his reasoning is quite praiseworthy.
Without Harford telling it, I have always believed that dissent has a role in life and in decision making. Harford gently connects dissent with adaptation, which is, in fact, nothing but Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory of the survival of the fittest in a given environment. What, however, Harford does not say is this. Fear is the greatest impediment to success. Slay the dragon of fear and humans can achieve extra-ordinary feats, which you can also label as success.
Overcoming the fear of failure takes effort and Harford’s argument of adapt and prosper is valid but hardly new.
Harford presents arresting case studies of decision making in government and corporate sector where top-down hierarchy leaves little room for honest feedback or dissent.
Harford points to HR McMaster’s acclaimed book Dereliction of Duty which argues that the US government and President Lyndon B Johnson bungled up the Vietnam war effort because the US establishment refused to adapt and revise their strategy. Adapt observes “Johnson, an insecure man with the presidency thrust upon him by John F Kennedy’s murder was eager for reassurance and disliked debate. His defence secretary Robert McNamara was the quintessential yes-man, soothing Johnson at every step and ruthlessly enforcing the president’s request to hear a single voice.” McMaster has pointed out in his Dereliction of Duty why alternative perspective is important in decision making. Dereliction of Duty is a definitive account of how an organization can fail from top down.
Harford, in Adapt, says forty years later, nothing has changed in the US military establishment pointing out defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s refusal to listen to dissenting advice, dooming the allied forces in Iraq.
Harford rightly observes that no leader can make the right decision every time. Napoleon, perhaps the finest general in history, invaded Russia with half a million men and lost over 90 per cent of them to death and desertion. Mao Zedong was the greatest of all insurgent commanders but a catastrophic peacetime leader whose blundering arrogance killed tens of millions of his own people.
Harford writes: “We need whistleblowers in our own lives to warn us about the latent errors that we have made and which are just waiting to catch us out. In short, we all need a critic, and for most of us the inner critic is not frankly enough. We need someone who can help us hold those two jostling thoughts at the same time: I’m not a failure – but I have made a mistake.”
He adds:” To embrace the idea of adapting in everyday life seems to be to accept blundering into a process of unremitting failure.”
Harford quotes a Prussian general who once put it, ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy,’ and says what matters is how quickly the leader is able to adapt.
And if you are able to adapt, you may be the next leader.

Title: Adapt (Why Success Always Starts With Failure)
Author: Tim Harford
Publisher: Little, Brown and Hachette India
Price: Rs499
Pages: 311

Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts, says Jonathan Franzen

2011-06-02T21:38:00.001+05:30

Jonathan Franzen is the author, most recently, of “Freedom.” This essay is adapted from a commencement speech he delivered on May 21 at Kenyon College. This essay first appeared in The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune
By JONATHAN FRANZEN
A COUPLE of weeks ago, I replaced my three-year-old BlackBerry Pearl with a much more powerful BlackBerry Bold. Needless to say, I was impressed with how far the technology had advanced in three years. Even when I didn’t have anybody to call or text or e-mail, I wanted to keep fondling my new Bold and experiencing the marvelous clarity of its screen, the silky action of its track pad, the shocking speed of its responses, the beguiling elegance of its graphics.
I was, in short, infatuated with my new device. I’d been similarly infatuated with my old device, of course; but over the years the bloom had faded from our relationship. I’d developed trust issues with my Pearl, accountability issues, compatibility issues and even, toward the end, some doubts about my Pearl’s very sanity, until I’d finally had to admit to myself that I’d outgrown the relationship.
Do I need to point out that — absent some wild, anthropomorphizing projection in which my old BlackBerry felt sad about the waning of my love for it — our relationship was entirely one-sided? Let me point it out anyway.
Let me further point out how ubiquitously the word “sexy” is used to describe late-model gadgets; and how the extremely cool things that we can do now with these gadgets — like impelling them to action with voice commands, or doing that spreading-the-fingers iPhone thing that makes images get bigger — would have looked, to people a hundred years ago, like a magician’s incantations, a magician’s hand gestures; and how, when we want to describe an erotic relationship that’s working perfectly, we speak, indeed, of magic.
Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.
Its first line of defense is to commodify its enemy. You can all supply your own favorite, most nauseating examples of the commodification of love. Mine include the wedding industry, TV ads that feature cute young children or the giving of automobiles as Christmas presents, and the particularly grotesque equation of diamond jewelry with everlasting devotion. The message, in each case, is that if you love somebody you should buy stuff.
A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)
But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.
If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).
Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.
And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.
I may be overstating the case, a little bit. Very probably, you’re sick to death of hearing social media disrespected by cranky 51-year-olds. My aim here is mainly to set up a contrast between the narcissistic tendencies of technology and the problem of actual love. My friend Alice Sebold likes to talk about “getting down in the pit and loving somebody.” She has in mind the dirt that love inevitably splatters on the mirror of our self-regard.
The simple fact of the matter is that trying to be perfectly likable is incompatible with loving relationships. Sooner or later, for example, you’re going to find yourself in a hideous, screaming fight, and you’ll hear coming out of your mouth things that you yourself don’t like at all, things that shatter your self-image as a fair, kind, cool, attractive, in-control, funny, likable person. Something realer than likability has come out in you, and suddenly you’re having an actual life.
Suddenly there’s a real choice to be made, not a fake consumer choice between a BlackBerry and an iPhone, but a question: Do I love this person? And, for the other person, does this person love me?
There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.
And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.
When I was in college, and for many years after, I liked the natural world. Didn’t love it, but definitely liked it. It can be very pretty, nature. And since I was looking for things to find wrong with the world, I naturally gravitated to environmentalism, because there were certainly plenty of things wrong with the environment. And the more I looked at what was wrong — an exploding world population, exploding levels of resource consumption, rising global temperatures, the trashing of the oceans, the logging of our last old-growth forests — the angrier I became.
Finally, in the mid-1990s, I made a conscious decision to stop worrying about the environment. There was nothing meaningful that I personally could do to save the planet, and I wanted to get on with devoting myself to the things I loved. I still tried to keep my carbon footprint small, but that was as far as I could go without falling back into rage and despair.
BUT then a funny thing happened to me. It’s a long story, but basically I fell in love with birds. I did this not without significant resistance, because it’s very uncool to be a birdwatcher, because anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool. But little by little, in spite of myself, I developed this passion, and although one-half of a passion is obsession, the other half is love.
And so, yes, I kept a meticulous list of the birds I’d seen, and, yes, I went to inordinate lengths to see new species. But, no less important, whenever I looked at a bird, any bird, even a pigeon or a robin, I could feel my heart overflow with love. And love, as I’ve been trying to say today, is where our troubles begin.
Because now, not merely liking nature but loving a specific and vital part of it, I had no choice but to start worrying about the environment again. The news on that front was no better than when I’d decided to quit worrying about it — was considerably worse, in fact — but now those threatened forests and wetlands and oceans weren’t just pretty scenes for me to enjoy. They were the home of animals I loved.
And here’s where a curious paradox emerged. My anger and pain and despair about the planet were only increased by my concern for wild birds, and yet, as I began to get involved in bird conservation and learned more about the many threats that birds face, it became easier, not harder, to live with my anger and despair and pain.
How does this happen? I think, for one thing, that my love of birds became a portal to an important, less self-centered part of myself that I’d never even known existed. Instead of continuing to drift forward through my life as a global citizen, liking and disliking and withholding my commitment for some later date, I was forced to confront a self that I had to either straight-up accept or flat-out reject.
Which is what love will do to a person. Because the fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.
When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them.
And who knows what might happen to you then?

Becoming Indian by Pavan K Varma: A Review

2011-05-31T23:03:00.003+05:30

By John Cheeran
Pavan K Varma’s Becoming Indian is an interesting read. Varma’s principal points are language, race and culture.
It is an effort largely meant for immigrant Indians who may have an identity crisis while living abroad although in the earlier part of the book he argues for bringing Indian languages out of the shadow of English.
Varma, an Indian bureaucrat, at times comes across as a man inspired by Hindu revivalism for Becoming Indian reminds readers how great a civilization India was five thousand years ago.
Becoming Indian has message with which I have no quarrel. One should not forget his or her cultural roots while getting swamped by globalization. It is a position no self-respecting individual can ignore. But to assume and argue that since your past is so glorious, you can be contemptuous towards modern trends and thoughts would be a suicidal jump.
Varma sounds like a right-winger when he worries about Indians in India, too, losing their culture and more. Echoing Ram Manohar Lohia, he is anxious about the spread and influence of English in contemporary India.
Varma writes: “The resolve to give our own languages the respect that is their due is part of the unfinished agenda of independence.”
Knowing English should not be in clash with Varma’s the earlier stated agenda. What India needs now is an improved level of literacy. Be it in English or any other language.
It is quite another matter that Varma’s career is based on his ability to handle a language which is, in his own words, alien to our ethos. He writes about a new casteism based on the proficiency of English. I wonder whether Varma knows that Dalits recently have built a temple for goddess English. Dalits have realized that the route to prosperity lies not in flogging a dead horse such as Sanskrit but taking the reins of English in their own hands. Varma would be cursing Lord Macaulay’s legacy. People can’t choose their mother tongue but let them choose their languages, let it be more than one.
Varma’s arguments about becoming Indian are both dangerous and flimsy when he writes about the need to speak and write in indigenous language and be seeped in desi culture. Varma, the north Indian babu that he is, easily forgets the fact that there are few things that tie together this vast, disparate nation together. Which culture has Varma in mind when he waxes eloquent about Indian culture? Tamilian’s? or Bengali’s? or Bihari’s?
It is tricky to assume that only what majority does is culture. English plays a critical role in ensuring India’s unity. India today talks to itself in English to understand itself better. You cannot wish away this reality.
And the wide and varied cultures of different regions and communities can be appreciated only with sub-titles and translations in India, mostly, again in English.
So if you are comfortable with such a situation in India, why should one worry about the deleterious effects of Western cultural homogenization? May be one should point out to Varma that MTV and channel V in India are hardly recognizable versions of their ‘degenerate’ western avatars. So are McDonald’s outlets which now cater to Indian vegetarian palate through its samosas and other Indian snacks.
And, finally, I want to ask Pavan Varma this question. Why didn’t he write Becoming Indian in Hindi or any other Indian language? In fact Penguin’s blurb informs me that Varma has written all his books in English. So much for his imperative of bringing Indian languages out of the shadow of English.

Title: Becoming Indian
Author: Pavan K Varma
Publisher: Allen Lane (Penguin)
Price: Rs499
Pages: 275

‘We are walking porn for Indians. But beware of cricketers’

2011-05-11T19:16:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
Thank you, Gabriella Pasqualotto for telling the truth.
The IPL cheergirl from South Africa who was part of the Mumbai Indians squad finally said what we had talked about in hushed whispers all along -- that cricketers chase the skirt, more than the ball.
She was quickly fired from the cheerleading squad by IPL chairman Chirayu Amin after a cricketer complained about her blog post for alternativecricketalmanack.com
I cannot but mention that when golfer Tiger Woods was swirled into a sex scandal two years ago, some of us were discussing whether India’s cricketing god was the biggest philanderer in international sport. But, again, that’s Indian cricket’s best kept secret. May be one day, a brave, spunky girl would shed her inhibitions, after shedding her clothes, to tell the truth just as Gabriella did.
But, for now, Gabriella has not damaged the reputations of Indian cricketers. Says she: “The few Indian players we have met, such as MS Dhoni and Rohit Sharma have been very polite and keep to themselves in the dark corners. Hotshots like Tendulkar with families at home are never present.”
The fact that Gabriella’s tell-all post was published on April 28, but the Indian media caught on to the story only NOW, tells the narrative skills of our mainstream media. All of them who waited upon cricketers during the last year’s IPL afterhours parties had the same stories as that of Gabriella to tell but only in private.
Now that she is back home in South Africa, Gabriella had more to say about the disgraceful manner in which she was booted out. She says: “I was sent home as if I was a criminal. I was treated as if I had taken drugs or done something awful, and I was never offered an opportunity to give my side of the story.”

Below is an excerpt from Gabriella’s blog that cost her place in the IPL.

To the citizens, we are practically like walking porn! All eyes are on you all the time; it is complete voyeurism. The women double take, see you and then pretend you do not exist. The men see your face, then your boobs, your butt, and then your boobs again! As we walk, all you hear is “IPL, IPL!” with a little head jingle!

‘Ol Graeme Smith will flirt with anything while his girlfriend lurks behind him. The Aussies are fun but naughty, such as Aiden Blizzard and Dan Christian. By the end of a crazy evening, a certain someone had played kissing catchers with three girls known to me only, although he has his own girlfriend back home. He cooed to each girl, “Come home with me, I just want to cuddle!’
Oh, please! I have come to realise that cricketers are the most loose and mischievous sportsmen I have come across. Makes me wonder if I should worry about them more than the commoners on the street! I still have a long while here, so I shall keep my tip list in mind.
Tip number 1: ‘Beware of the cricketers!’

The Sunset Club by Khushwant Singh: A Review

2011-05-03T22:00:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran

Few consider Khushwant Singh as a great writer. He has been an agent provocateur, raconteur and a celebrated editor in India. Singh writes without pomposity and that’s the hallmark of his success as a writer.
Even in the autumn of his life the Sardar’s zest for life is undiminished and The Sunset Club is further proof for that. The Sunset Club, tagged as analects of the year 2009, chronicles the friendship of three oldies – a Hindu, a Sikh and a Muslim – but are commentaries on contemporary India, especially between January 26, 2009 and January 26, 2010.
It does not take great effort on your part to realize that Sardar Boota Singh is Khushwant Singh himself. At one point Nawab Barkatullah Baig Dehlavi tells his wife about Boota “He is good company. He spices his talk with anecdotes, quotations and improper language. One can never tell how much of what he says is true, but it doesn’t matter. I enjoy listening to him.”
Readers, too, enjoy listening to Khushwant Singh. Through the discussions among the three friends Singh subtly reveals where his sympathies lie. Singh has only contempt for ‘fundoos’ and turncoats such as Najma Heptullah are subjected to ridicule.
Yes, improper language punctuates the pages of The Sunset Club. Singh has tried to keep the old men’s bench at Lodhi Gardens warm throughout the pages mainly by the sexual exploits of bachelor Punjabi brahmin Sharma, Baig and Boota. But those exploits are too simple to arouse the reader’s interest and only the portrait of contemporary India that forces you to finish the book. Yes, old age and infirmity lurks in the background but it is the recollections of the youth and hope for the next day that is remarkable about the Sunset. And despite the departure of Baig and Sharma, it is hope that makes Boota gaze upon Bara Gumbad and feel that it still does resemble the fully rounded bosom of a young woman.

Title: The Sunset Club
Author: Khushwant Singh
Publisher: Penguin Viking (2010)
Pages: 218
Price: 399

Geek Nation by Angela Saini: A Review

2011-04-30T00:08:00.003+05:30

By John Cheeran
India is in the eyes of the beholder. It can be anything to anyone. Such freedom allows you to come up with premises such as ‘Is India a geek nation?’
Angela Saini’s Geek Nation – how Indian science is taking over the world -- is an attempt to find out whether the large number of engineers and doctors churned out by this vast country’s educational institutions make it a nation of geeks. Saini, a UK-based science journalist, after her detours through space centres and Sanskrit research institutes is not entirely convinced that India is geeky in spirit and soul.
Geek Nation is an interesting read. Saini, daughter of an Indian immigrant engineer, is an engineer-turned-journalist. Her book informs the reader about the ancient and modern tradition of India’s experiments with truth and science.
For, how many, in this age of ‘information technology,’ know of the role played by former prime minister Jawahar Lal Nehru to inculcate scientific temper among the ignorant and illiterate masses? Saini, quite rightly, points out that contemporary India’s large posse of software engineers and doctors and technicians are a direct result of the lead role played by Nehru especially in setting up premier institutions such as Indian Institute of Technology (IITs).
And, yes, an Indian – Aryabhatta -- invented zero! But such an inquisitive tradition has been abused too in modern India. The trend of Indian middle classes re-imagining a glorious Hindu past and looking for all science in Vedas and Upanishads is in fact hilarious as well as disturbing.
To begin with Saini is forced to explain the title of her book. In the past to be a geek meant something of an oddball. And that’s why Infosys chairman NR Narayana Murthy asks Saini ‘is geek a good thing?’ Saini reassures him that being a geek is a good thing according to her book.
Saini, in her quest for geek grail, visits Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Thumpa in Kerala, Indian Space Science Research Organisation in Bangalore, Infosys Campus in Electronics City, IBM India Research Lab, Tata Consultancy Services headquarters, National Botanical Research Institute in Lucknow, International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, the tuberculosis clinic in Chennai as well as the Academy of Sanskrit Research in Melkot in Karnataka, and The Oriental Research Institute in Mysore. She also meets Indian Rationalist Association president Sanal Edamaruku in New Delhi. And, much more.
Predictably, scientists who Saini visit are an optimistic lot and assure that India will catch up with science superpowers such as the US, China and Japan soon. But it is quite evident that scientific temper that Nehru wished for is quite absent in the country despite the large number of qualified engineers and doctors.
The zeal of some of India’s scientists leaves Saini troubled as in the case of Champadi Raman Mukundan, the inventor of the Brain Electrical Oscillations Signature software. Mukundan claims that he can read anyone’s mind with his mindreading machine. Saini says the problem lies with Indian leaders and police officers, in thrall to science and technology, seem willing to place their trust in new research and inventors however wacky their ideas might sound to others. In India, unlike anywhere else, nuttiness, without which science can’t flourish, is encouraged without any questions. It can, at times, backfire too.
The only way India can transform its society is by coming up with cutting edge scientific and technological inventions. India’s so called IT revolution has not yet resulted in a microchip. We still don’t have our own aircraft engine. We can’t develop drugs that will cure infectious diseases. Saini observes that efforts of Indian biotechnologists to develop a single drug to fight tuberculosis remain almost a lottery.
India aims for low-cost solutions. India’s research budget is frugal when compared to the West and China. The country’s advantage is that it has a huge, but cheap, educated workforce who can be tasked to crack software and research codes. There is no reason to despair of a technological dystopia. May luck be with India.
But I wonder why Saini visited Lavasa and a devote a whole chapter – Geeks Rule – to Ajit Gulabchand’s real estate project when she wanted to figure out if there was a real scientific revolution going on in the country.
Finally, is it of any consequence that I was reading Geek Nation a few days after the ‘Geek Nation’ paid a tearful farewell to Sathya Sai Baba, considered a saint by many and a charlatan by many others?

Title: Geek Nation
Author: Angela Saini
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Hachette India
Pages: 280
Price: 499

Third Best by Arjun Rao: A Review

2011-04-22T21:46:00.003+05:30

By John Cheeran
Making out was not a term in vogue when we went to a co-ed school. The Class of 1999 at Shore Mount, of course, has different priorities. Arjun Rao’s Third Best has plenty of stolen kisses, dreamy as well as cynical lovers, music, bullying, boxing and football. But it does not have a centre.
Third Best traces the life of a batch of schoolmates in Shore Mount, an imaginary co-ed public school meant for the progeny of the rich, upper middle class. It is an enjoyable first novel from Rao but I wonder how many of the characters will stay with the reader after she finishes the final page.
Every writer should not be burdened with expectations of tackling the great questions of his or her day. That would be pointless. Here Rao offers us a peek into a whole lot of youngsters (the class of 1999) but in the process he has failed to do justice to any one of them. Easily said, Third Best is the story of the coming of age of Nirvan Shrivastav, a shy, reluctant hero burdened with a family history of achievements at Mount.
Nirvan is in awe of his successful elder brother Moksh who is with him at the Mount, and his father and grandfather. The blossoming of Nirvan’s leadership qualities, grit and fidelity however fails to sweep you off your feet. Yes, Nirvan stands firm when bullied and beaten almost to death by Nanda and still does not rat on him. Nirvan, the quiet hero, reclaims his girlfriend Ruma from the boxing champion Nanda through a Bollywood kind of revenge but does not win over readers.
Among the many faces that make up Third Best --- Gautam, Nirvan, Ruma, Natasha, Bose, Zoya, Gomez ---, I was fascinated by Faraz the handsome. Girls, juniors and seniors, are always chasing him and asking him out on the dance floor but the guy falls for his teacher Zoya, living without her husband who is serving the Indian army in Nagaland. There was minimum of fuss in their mutual need and all that music that flows and enriches Third Best added warmth and poignancy to a foredoomed relationship.
Rao writes well but should have been persuaded by the editors to limit himself. At 376 pages, Third Best is an overwritten answer sheet.

(Arjun Rao studied in The Lawrence School in Lovedale and now teaches history in The Doon School, Dehradun.)

Bharat bhagya vidhata ! (by MJ Akbar in Sunday Guardian)

2011-04-03T20:55:00.003+05:30

Editor's note: The Greatest Headline on Sunday Morning: Bharat bhagya vidhata by MJ Akbar in Sunday Guardian.

Trust MJ Akbar to come up with the three words that summed up the nation's mood and the winning moment on Saturday night in Mumbai. This one was definitely sweeter than the one he gave for The Asian Age front page when India defeated Pakistan in the 1996 World Cup quarter final played in Bangalore -- VICTORY. A few weeks later I joined The Asian Age in New Delhi.

A cursory look at Sunday’s morning newspapers in India reveals the paucity of clearheaded thinking in newsrooms. Few newspapers had the élan to think in simple, but striking terms. All the more reason to raise a toast to Akbar.

Below read the front page comment Akbar wrote in Sunday Guardian celebrating and savouring the emperor's -- Mahendra Singh Dhoni -- great triumph as a leader. India winning its second World Cup.

By MJ Akbar in The Sunday Guardian

The romance of cricket has but one competitor, the mystery of conspiracy. When the two become part of the same narrative, there is an all-time best-seller. We have had two in one week.
The credibility of both SMSes and bookies rose sharply before the IndiaPakistan semi-final when a pre-match SMS circulated what the bookies thought — or knew? — what was going to happen: India would bat first, make 260, lose 3 to 4 wickets in first 25 overs, Pak would cruise to 100, lose 2 quick wickets, be 150 for 5, crumble and lose by over 20 runs. Twenty minutes before the finals on Saturday I received this SMS: Lanka will bat first, score between 240 to 250. Tendulkar would fail (meaning, score 37), as would Sehwag, but Gambhir would shine and India would win.
At 2.30 pm Lanka batted first, but the prescient SMS had underestimated their score. They put on a batting performance that began with professional virtuosity, and paced it like a musical overture: minimum fuss at the start, no histrionics, the music’s passage crafted by a captain who knew this had to be the innings of his life, but ending with a thunderous clash of cymbals, a mighty final five overs that climaxed a perfect harmony. Mahela Jayawardene’s Sri Lanka had outdistanced the know-all SMS by a crucial 25 runs. Would that become the vital difference that kept the World Cup in either the largest or the smallest of the cricket countries of South Asia?
It was evident that Mahendra Dhoni had made his first big mistake of the tournament by investing in Sreesanth. It was not merely the runs that he gave away to Lanka’s cool batsmen, but the manner in which he gave them, with that strange alchemy of petulance and ability that has made him a wanderer rather than a fixture in the side. Sreesanth is not a boy big enough for the big moment.
The Indian innings was an essay in transition. The old order was giving way to the new. Gautam Gambhir did not merely deliver in mathematical terms, important as they are; a new captain was claiming his place for the future in front of the most important audience of his career. When Gambhir and Dhoni were batting with India at 170 for 3, the only question was whether those last five overs of the Lanka innings had been the gamechanger. At this stage, a target of 140 to 250, with Yuvraj still to come was eminently reasonable. India was full of runs and Lanka short of wickets. There was suddenly a big hole where wickets should have been, and for one reason alone: the last finale of the greatest bowler in Lanka’s history, Muralitharan, seemed to have lost its magical, piercing rhythm.
Dhoni and Gambhir made the failure of Sehwag and Sachin irrelevant. A team is always greater than the sum of its most combustible sparklers. Such was their dominance that when Murli returned in the last ten overs, he surrendered a wide and was hit for a four. The mojo was gone. Then, as if to prove that cricket would always remain the eventual winner, Gambhir was bowled. Drama revived, a dying game returned to life. Indian hearts were attacked when a run out and an lbw went to the third umpire at 241. But there was a batting power play left. Surely India could not come so near and yet be so far.
If Sri Lanka had a king as their captain, India had an emperor. Moreover, he had a prince as partner, Yuvraj. Emperors save their best for the last. The six that brought India its second World Cup, in the new capital of international cricket, will be adorned in history as the finest stroke of a game that began in England and has become Indian. The final began with the Indian national anthem. Our anthem was the perfect metaphor. Bharat bhagya vidhata…Jaya hey!

2011 World Cup: When greatness beckons Dhoni’s India

2011-03-25T20:04:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
Greatness beckons Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his men. When it mattered, India came up with a fine team effort to knock the faltering world champions Australia from their unsteady pedestal. From being banished from the first round of the 2007 World Cup, India, under Dhoni’s leadership, has come a long way.
In 1996, too, played at home, India had carved out a confident victory in the quarterfinal. However, that quarterfinal will now be played when India clashes with Pakistan in Mohali in what is 2011 semifinal. Few would now like to recall what happened in the semifinal against Sri Lanka in 1996. Banish all negative thoughts, say shrinks.
This has been an interesting World Cup so far for India and Indians. Dhoni, as a captain and player, and his men hardly inspired confidence in the group stage except against the West Indians, in their last group match. They stuttered against Ireland, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, England and South Africa.
Well, the important point was that they lost only one game -- against South Africa -- though they came quite close to that against the now-hot, now-cold England.
No one can now accuse India that they are over dependent on their talisman, Sachin Tendulkar. Yes, Tendulkar is in great form. He has hit two brilliant centuries but none in a winning cause and to say this would be churlish. It was not Tendulkar’s fault that the rest of the batsmen couldn’t contribute enough in those two matches to seal the victory. But equally what matters is that whenever India won there were other men working hard to ensure the winning runs. And that augurs well for India not just in the World Cup but for the coming days as well.
Hopes are ballooning to new heights now all across this vast, passionate but broiling land. Heat is on. Can India defeat their neighbours and intense rivals Pakistan in the semifinal to be played on March 30? A lot many people said India’s match against Australia in the quarterfinal was the final played two matches early. That is preposterous. The real turner, the game-changer is only at hand. No match between India and Pakistan could be watched without keeping a dose of aspirin at hand. The heart attack could come at any moment.
Many are taking refuge in the fact that India has never lost a match against Pakistan in the World Cups. Three of those wins came during the campaign of Mohammad Azharuddin, who knew how to spread his butter and bets. In 1992, when Imran Khan lifted the World Cup we could console ourselves by replaying the winning moments against Pakistan in the group stage. In 1996, India’s disappointments were washed away in the slipstream of the quarterfinal victory against Pakistan in Bangalore. In 1999, in the backdrop of Kargil skirmish, Azharuddin’s Indians were feted for defeating Pakistan yet again, though Pakistan went on to play Australia in the final. There is no final bigger than the clash against Pakistan. In 2003, Sourav Ganguly’s decision to bowl first in the final against Australia was pardoned since India had beaten Pakistan in the early stage.
All these are comforting thoughts. In a surcharged atmosphere in Mohali, India could stop the band of mercenaries from Pakistan, led by the wild and wily Shahid Afridi. Pakistan the country would be on the verge of an implosion but despite almost being a cricketing outcast, that team has been justifying its right to play dazzling and exasperating cricket. The absence of star players has not stopped Afridi’s men from being inventive, divisive and united on the field.
By applying the right kind of heat, the solid Pakistan can be liquefied. India outclassed an Australia in decline by playing to its strength, spin. Ricky Ponting, despite a self-flagellating century, lost the match to India by investing his faith in his pace trio of Brett Lee, Shaun Tait and Mitchell Johnson, the Kangaroo hallmark in the post-Shane Warne era.
Has Dhoni sorted out his bowling worries? To ask R Ashwin to open bowling could prove suicidal against the fleet-footed Pakistanis. How would Indian spinners fare when confronted by the cheeky Pakistanis? Is there a spinner in the Indian ranks with the effectiveness of Afridi, who has taken 21 wickets in the tournament so far?
Virender Sehwag and Tendulkar are capable of hanging Pakistani spinners from the outside edge of their bats. But one cannot be blind to the reality that Pakistan boasts of a better bowling attack.
Someone – fate, God or the betting syndicate -- has already decided who will win this World Cup. All of us – including Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka, are waiting to find out which is that side. The side that has much more than a Tendulkar, prayer mats and beads. You bet.

Dubai on Empty: AA Gill in Vanity Fair

2011-03-18T22:34:00.001+05:30

Editor's note: For those who have lived in Dubai and those who are still living in Dubai and for those who are itching to go to Dubai.

Its skyline erupting from the desert in just two decades, Dubai is a cautionary tale about what money can’t buy: a culture of its own. After gorging on the Viagra of easy credit, the emirate has the world’s tallest building, the world’s most expensive racetrack, and a financial crisis to match. From the Western mercenaries and Asian drones who maintain the gaudy show to 100-odd families who are impervious to any economic reality, A. A. Gill discovers that no one truly belongs in Dubai, where the legacy of oil has made everything worthless.

The only way to make sense of Dubai is to never forget that it isn’t real. It’s a fable, a fairy tale, like The Arabian Nights. More correctly, it’s a cautionary tale. Dubai is the story of the three wishes, where, as every kid knows, with the third wish you demand three more wishes. And as every genie knows, more wishes lead to more greed, more misery, more bad credit, and much, much, much more bad taste. Dubai is Las Vegas without the showgirls, the gambling, or Elvis. Dubai is a financial Disneyland without the fun. It’s a holiday resort with the worst climate in the world. It boils. It’s humid. And the constant wind is full of sand. The first thing you see when you arrive is the airport, with its echoing marble halls. It’s big enough to be the hub of a continent. Dubai suffers from gigantism—a national inferiority complex that has to make everything bigger and biggest. This includes their financial crisis.
Outside, in the sodden heat, you pass hundreds and hundreds of regimented palm trees and you wonder who waters them and what with. The skyline, in the dusty haze, looks like the cover of a dystopian science-fiction novella. Clusters of skyscrapers lurch out at the gray desert accompanied by their moribund cranes, propped up with scaffolding, swagged in plastic sheeting. Dubai thought it was going to grow up to be the Arab Singapore—a commercial, banking, and insurance service port on the Gulf with hospitality and footballers’ time-shares, an oasis of R&R for the less well endowed. But it hasn’t quite worked out. The vertical streets of offices are empty. A derelict skyscraper looks exactly the same as one that’s teeming with commerce. They huddle around the current tallest building in the world—a monument to small-nation penis envy. This pylon erected with the Viagra of credit is now a big, naked exclamation of Dubai’s fiscal embarrassment. It was going to be called Burj Dubai, but as Dubai was unable to make their payments, they were forced to go to their Gulf neighbor, head towel in hand, to get a loan. So now it’s called Burj Khalifa, after Abu Dhabi’s ruler, who coughed up $10 billion to its over-extended neighbor.
Dubai has been built very fast. The plan was money. The architect was money. The designer was money and the builder was money. And if you ever wondered what money would look like if it were left to its own devices, it’s Dubai.
My driver gets lost more than once. He’s lived here all his life. He says he always gets lost. The roads keep changing. It’s a confusion of orange traffic cones and interlocking barriers; access roads peter out into long drops to rubble and dust. Nothing actually goes anywhere. The wide lanes loop around endlessly, and then there’s no place to go. No plaza or square, no center. Nowhere to hang out, nowhere to walk. Why would you walk? In this heat? You pull over and throw your keys to a valet, and get indoors as quickly as possible, generally in one of the countless shopping centers that look like the airports of lesser nations or Egyptian tombs. They echo with the slow footfalls of the security guards. In the boutiques, the glossy assistants stare at mannequins with a mutual mime of cashmere-folding despair. Dubai has been mugged by its own greed. Its consumer economy is being maintained by oil-rich families to whom depressions, booms, lottery wins, and recessions mean little. Riches and wealth are relative terms. But not ones we’re related to. There is an indoor ski mountain, probably the biggest indoor ski mountain in a desert, where the Arab boys queue for suits and boots and skis. The smarter locals arrive in their own designer après-ski gear, with fur and moon boots. You walk through the doors and it’s like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—the land of permanent winter. The fat boys push past carrying their snowboards toward the Tyrolean chocolate shop and Swiss fir trees and slide down the hill with a practiced arrogance. The girls slither, splay-legged, hijabs fluttering, in the manufactured snow.
No one dreamed of this. Twenty years ago, none of this was here. No Narnia. No seven-star hotels. No tallest prick buildings. Just a home of pastoralist tented families herding goats, racing camels, shooting one another. And a handful of greasy, armed empire mechanics in khaki shorts, drilling for oil. In just one life span, Dubai has gone from sitting on a rug to swiveling on a fake Eames chair 100 stories up. And not a single local has had to lift a finger to make it happen. That’s not quite fair—of course they’ve lifted a finger; to call the waiter, berate the busboy. The money seeped out of the ground and they spent it. Pretty much all of it. You look at this place and you realize not a single thing is indigenous, not one of this culture’s goods and chattels originated here. Even the goats have gone. This was a civilization that was bought wholesale. The Gulf is the proof of Carnegie’s warning about wealth: “There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else.” Emiratis are born retired. They waft through this city in their white dishdashas and headscarves and their obsessively tapered humorless faces. They’re out of place in their own country. They have imported and built a city, a fortress of extravagance, that excludes themselves. They have become duplicitous, schizophrenic. They don’t allow their own national dress in the clubs and bars that serve alcohol, the restaurants with the hungry girls sipping champagne. So they slip into Western clothes to go out.
The Gulf Arabs have become the minority in this country they wished out of the desert. They are now less than 20 percent of the total population. Among the other 80-plus percent are the white mercenary workers who come here for tax-free salaries to do managerial and entrepreneurial jobs, parasites and sycophants for cash. For them money is a driving principle and validation. They came to be young, single, greedy, and insincere. None of them are very clever. So they live lives that revolve around drink and porn sex and pool parties and barbecues with a lot of hysterical laughing and theme nights, karaoke, and slobbery, regretful coupling. In fact, as in all cases of embarrassing arrested development, these expats on the short-term make don’t expect to put down roots here, have children here, or grow old here. Everyone’s on a visa dependent on a job.
Then there is a third category of people: the drones. The workers. The Asians: Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans, and Filipinos. Early in the morning, before the white mercenaries have negotiated their hangovers, long before the Emiratis have shouted at the maid, buses full of hard-hatted Asians pull into building sites. They have the tough, downtrodden look of Communist posters from the 30s—they are both the slaves of capital and the heroes of labor. Asians man the hotels; they run the civil service and the utilities and commercial businesses; they are the clerks and the secretaries, the lawyers, the doctors, the accountants; there isn’t a single facet of this state that would function if they didn’t maintain it. No one with an Emirati passport could change a fuse. Yet, the workers, who make up roughly 71 percent of the population, have precious few rights here. They can’t become citizens, though some are the third generation of their family to be born here. They can be deported at any time. They have no redress. Many of the Asian laborers are owed back pay they aren’t likely to get. There are reams of anecdotal stories about the abuse of guest workers. I’m told about the Pakistani shop assistant who, picking up an Arab woman’s shopping bags, accidentally passed gas, got arrested, and was jailed.
The Arabs live in their own ghettos, large, dull containments of big houses that are half garage behind security walls, weighed down with satellite dishes. We drive by an empty lot, and my driver tells me that this was the site of the house of the second son of a high-ranking official. Daddy had it bulldozed when his boy was caught having a Western-style rich-brats’ party. There is a growing, unspoken problem with the indigenous youth here. Fat, and spoiled beyond reason, they are titanically rude. They have reportedly taken to forming slovenly gangs that have been responsible for random attacks on foreign workers and women simply for the computer-game fun of it. This is a generation of kids who expect to never seriously work—but do expect secure jobs. An Indian manager who runs hotels in Dubai told me that everybody dreads the call from some royal Arab telling them to expect a nephew who will be coming to work. The boy will demand an office, a secretary, a car, wages, deference, and an empty schedule. It’s a sort of protection shakedown that you pay to do business here.
The Al Maktoums are secretive and autocratic, as most Arab despots are. The emir is always prime minister. Abu Dhabi’s ruler is always president. The royal family’s public exposure is universally adoring, supine, sycophantic, and breathlessly bland. There are rumors, always rumors, about disappeared princesses, abducted children, madness, and suicide. The royal family owes its power to an intricate web of family alliance, patronage, and operatic charity. It is sincerely respected.
The Al Maktoums have taken to horse racing. They practically own the British and Irish bloodstock business. It’s a clever and self-serving hobby. Horses are one of the very few upper-class American and European enthusiasms that are shared with Arabs. All racehorses have a little Arab in them. So the Al Maktoums can mix in the West without that stigma that the Saudis suffer from back home—the public decorum with a private, Western decadence. The simple business of betting is of course ignored with a disdainfully turned shoulder. Since Dubai’s construction-based economy stumbled, the prince has obliviously opened a massive and spectacularly hideous hippodrome, the Meydan Racecourse. The biggest racetrack in the world, it cost almost $3 billion to build. It’s home to the Dubai World Cup, the most expensive horse race in the world, naturally. This place couldn’t have the second-most expensive horse race in the world. The winner pockets $10 million.
The track sits in a wasteland surrounded by the exhausted squirm of motorways. I walk around it and look not at the galloping horses and their bright jockeys but back up at the stands. Here in one long panorama is the Dantean vision of modern Dubai—the Arabs huddled in a glass dome, looking like creatures from a Star Trek episode in their sepulchral winding-sheet dishdashas. Next to them are the stands for Westerners, mostly British, loud and drunk, dressed in their tarty party gear. The girls, raucous and provocative, have fat thighs that wobble in tiny frocks. Cantilevered bosoms lurch. The boys, spiky and gelled, glassy-eyed and leering. In the last enclosure, the Asians, packed in with families and picnics, excited to be out of the Portakabin dormitories and the boredom and the homesickness of Internet cafés. In front of them all are the ranks of wired-up security guards, making sure the layers of this mutually dismissive society don’t pollute each other. After the horses have run, Elton John will perform.
Dubai is the parable of what money makes when it has no purpose but its own multiplication and grandeur. When the culture that holds it is too frail to contain it. Dubai is a place that doesn’t just know the price of everything and the value of nothing but makes everything worthless. The answer to everything in Dubai is money. In the darkness of the hot night, the motorways roar with Ferraris and Porsches and Lamborghinis; the fat boys are befuddled and stupefied by sports cars they race around on nowhere roads, going nowhere. Taxi drivers of their ambitionless, all-consuming entitlement. Shortchanged by being given everything. Cursed with money.

Wild Things by Dave Eggers: A Review

2011-03-14T21:03:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
As a kid I never read Where The Wild Things Are, the picture book by American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak. I missed the film version too when it was released. Now I’m lucky to have read Dave Eggers’s version The Wild Things at such an adult age, where there is little room left for wonder. Or so, I thought.
But The Wild Things made me five all over again. I was worried about the fate of Max the King every time Carol or Bull disagreed with him and gave dirty looks. With an imagination that often lands Max in trouble, the King uses it to good effect to rule over the beasts in the island.

To write engaging stuff for young people is a challenging task. Although it is only a retelling of the Sendak tale, Eggers’s skill as a storyteller comes across clearly. And, for me, not having read Sendak’s story, the joy, excitement and anxiety were real. Editor of McSweeney’s has done a great job.
Let the wild rumpus start!

Do you still bet on Dhoni and India?

2011-03-04T23:17:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
The World Cup is finally coming alive. With associate member Ireland outclassing England, the inventor of the game, in a glorious exhibition of cricketing nous, this World Cup is full of possibilities. There could be more stunning upsets along the way to Wankhede Stadium on April 2.
First is a straight question. Will India win the World Cup? Now there is swelling rank of doubting Thomases despite the belligerence against Bangladesh in the Cup opener and Sachin Tendulkar’s century against England. India’s bowling is weak with or without S Sreesanth, captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni must concede that point.
There is another immediate question. How much of a struggle will it be for India to overcome Ireland on Sunday? Yes, India will win against Ireland, will they huff and puff in doing that? If Ireland could chase down 327 runs against England, they could pretty well stretch India’s resources at Chinnaswamy Stadium. And remember that Ireland had knocked out Pakistan from the 2007 World Cup. And in this edition, they had come quite close to surprising Bangladesh. Now with the West Indies humiliating Bangladesh, they were bundled out for 58, Group B can throw up fascinating equations. And to consider that many had written off the West Indies side when the tournament began. It will hurt India hard that it lost a point when it tied with England. But, then, they were lucky to stop in England in its track in the final over.
In any tournament, in any international match, be it Test cricket, ODIs or Twnety20s, India’s problems always stemmed from its flaccid bowling attack. It does not take a third eye to spot that. With India’s fielding far below par, batsmen have a daunting task ahead of them. India’s spinners are struggling to take wickets. On the other hand, for Pakistan skipper Shahid Afridi has injected a new life with a stirring performance by capturing five wickets when it mattered against a rebellious bunch of Canadians.
And now we wonder who said India were the favourites to win the cup?

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest: A Review

2011-03-04T22:51:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
I just finished reading Stieg Larsson’s final part of the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. I’m yet to figure out the storm around Larsson’s trilogy. The book can hardly described as riveting writing or a thrilling piece of crime fiction. Yes, Larsson deals with individual freedom in an advanced society such as Sweden where personal liberty counts a great deal.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest is not a book that you would return to. It is too detailed, too long and lacks the element unknown to sustain the reader’s interest. I, however, found that Larsson’s depiction of newsroom tension quite interesting. It is hardly surprising when you consider that he was a journalist and an editor in Sweden. The other striking thing about Larsson’s work is the role of women. Lisbeth Salander is unusual heroine by Indian standards. She is the central figure in Millennium trilogy, warts and all. Not just Salander. A whole lot of feisty, independent women play crucial roles to take the story forward in Larsson’s long winding effort, including editor Erica Berger, lawyer Giannini and security agent Figuerola. All of them know what they want from life and go about getting it without less drama and less fuss. Compared to them the investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist is a wallflower.
Men, too, are from a different world, with their actions determined to a large extent by individual freedom with society taking a back seat in determining what is wrong and what is right. I did not enjoy The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest as crime fiction but it helped me to understand how life gets unspooled in a society where individual comes first, most of the times.
Disclosure: I’m yet to read the first two books – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire in the Millennium trilogy.

Madhouse: True stories of the inmates of Hostel 4, IIT-Bombay: A Review

2011-01-25T00:17:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
Here is an awesome book.
Madhouse: True stories of the inmates of Hostel 4, IIT-Bombay is going to be a trendsetter. It puts together utterly common and uncommon moments from the lives of a group of students, achievers of some sort, for they cracked the JEE to get in to the IIT.
Though all the recollections in Madhouse are specific to one of the hostels in IIT Bombay – there are 9 others, including a ladies hostel (hostel 10) but you don’t have to be an IITian to enjoy these true stories on hostel food, ragging, pondies, phone, entertainment programmes (EPs), copying, girlfriends and other assorted adventures.
These stories cover a timeline of less than 10 years (roughly a period ranging from 1972-1985) out of IIT Bombay’s more than 50-year history.
It’s an unputdownable book, especially if you remain young at heart. Any reader should be able to recall more than one occasion from his student/hostel life similar to that Madhouse speaks about. These colourful tales do make you nostalgic of a time of infinite freedom and immense pressure to live up to parental expectations.
Madhouse shatters a few myths regarding how above average and brilliant the guys and girls who make the cut to the IIT are. May be, after reading these true accounts, you would feel that what a bunch of quirky, degenerate and spoilt characters are these people, with no qualms about flouting rules of all kinds.
Some of these tales are absolutely wacky. Bakul Desai (contributing editor and a successful businessman based in Hyderabad) wanted to bring an elephant to the campus for the H4’s EP (entertainment programme). An enterprising Bakul, in his desperation, went to Antop Hill and had a negotiation with underworld don Varadaraja Mudaliar for renting out an elephant without knowing who the guy was. Later Bakul tells how they invented ways to use the public coin phone in the hostel without inserting coins. I burst out laughing when he described the day when a telephone department official came with a big bag to collect all the coins from the phone box but only to be shocked when he opened the box by the sight of matchsticks, broken strings, crumpled computer cards, rubber bands, clips, pins and an assortment of wires made of steel, copper, plastic, a wad of chewing gum and a 50 paise coin in the middle of it.
Who thought IIT students could be so enterprising?
Most of the heroes and heroines of Madhouse have done well in life. Many here recount that they learnt more by bunking classes than from classrooms.
Sudheendra Kulkarni, who was a commie then at IIT Bombay has traveled quite distance to become BJP ideologue and now an advisor to Trinamool Congress leader Mamata Banerjee. Manohar (Manu) Parrikar is another H4 inmate who became BJP chief minister of Goa and now the opposition leader in the assembly.
Urmilla Deshpande (editor) and Bakul Desai (contributing editor) deserve a toast for putting together this book. It was Bakul who took the lead to get the project on track. Urmilla played her role as a sensitive editor to perfection by letting these stories speak by themselves without the writer in her taking over to shape them. She realized that in these stories style and content were inseparable. She should know having married an H4 inmate Hashish Koj La (Ashish Khosla).

“I’m glad his agony is over” Girish Karnad on Bhimsen Joshi

2011-01-24T19:04:00.003+05:30

By John Cheeran
This should have been about Bhimsen Joshi but this is about Girish Karnad, playwright, actor and film director. All Monday morning television news channels in India were paying tributes to Pandit Joshi, 89, the music maestro, who passed away in Pune.

Anyone dies, in India, the tradition has been to say it is a great loss to country and the person’s chosen field of vocation. Karnad bluntly said Joshi’s passing away is no loss for the country. How different he sounded.

I have never met Karnad, only seen him and heard him on a couple of occasions in Bangalore. He has a booming voice and irreverent, blunt take on all things.
I have read Karnad’s play Hayavadana. I have watched him presenting the science programme Turning Point in the early days of Doordarshan. He always came across as a no-nonsense person. So it was not a surprise that Karnad, though quite close to Joshi, did not have any cloying tribute to offer.

Let’s listen to what Karnad said about Bhimsen Joshi.
“His death was no loss. In fact, I’m glad that his agony is over. I don’t think Indian music has lost anything by his passing away. He was not great but one of the most popular musicians of modern era. He was no guru. He was not worried about the next generation. He was worried only about developing himself as an artist. Joshi had god given talent. How he used it, developed it and enriched was all that mattered to him. He was no puritan. He loved music in any form. That makes him great. There was no hypocrisy. It was all upfront. He was built like horse. He used to drink, eat fish. He used to drink and perform at concert. He never failed to connect with his audience. He had a glorious life.”

Well, well. It’s time we learnt how to be honest from Karnad.

India = Innovative, Noisy, Dynamic, Inequitable, Adaptive, says Patrick French, author of India, a portrait

2011-01-21T20:00:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran

Author Patrick French fields 16 questions from John Cheeran in Bangalore

1. You are historian who writes biographies. Which role is more challenging, the role of biographer or that of historian?
It's more difficult to write good biography. How can you fully understand another's motivation?
2. The technique used in telling the India story, eliciting a nation’s contemporary history by talking to individuals, is one that perfected by VS Naipaul. Have you borrowed from Naipaul in terms of writing technique?
No. This is a new take on India - my own.
3. For whom – Indians or foreigners -- is this portrait mainly sketched for?
This is a book for every Indian reader, and especially for the youth. It asks: What is happening in India today - and why?
4. Your book has been projected as an intimate biography of 1.2 billion people. What’s the most striking, intimate aspect about the India that you chronicle?
That every paradox co-exists.
5. How would you sum up India in a sentence or, in six words?
Innovative, Noisy, Dynamic, Inequitable, Adaptive!
6. What makes you describe India the most interesting place in the world?
It was Ram Guha who said that, and I agreed with him. Can you think of a more interesting country?
7. You seem to have little love for MK Gandhi. In the book, you describe him as an anaconda. Has India done well to bury Gandhian ideals to embrace free market and redefine Hindu rate of growth?
I am an admirer of Gandhi in many ways, but I don't believe in blind deification of anyone.
8. Does India growth story need to make a pause to push social equity as suggested by some economists?
A pause in economic growth is not a sound or logical principle. Do you really believe that if the economy stopped generating money, the rich would give their money away to the poor?
9. Despite your perceptive analysis about hereditary aspects of Indian politics, you seem to be an admirer of Rahul Gandhi. Why?
Because he has a quiet and subtle approach to politics.
10. Do you think India is ready for its first Dalit or Muslim Prime Minister? Will it ever happen?
Yes.
11. You write in your book that a politician told you that you could buy journalists like prostitutes. How rotten is Indian media? You must have totally missed Radiia tapes while writing the book.
The book went to the publisher before the Raadia tapes were leaked. They are another example of what I write about.
12. The optimism with which you write about India – unlike many foreigners in the past – isn’t it misplaced? For the country has too many fault lines such as poverty, illiteracy, Maoists and even the indifference to suffering…
I don't think it's wrong to be optimistic about India. Good and bad don't cancel each other out.
13. Historian Ramachandra Guha says India is a 50-50 democracy. How do you rate and what do you think of Indian democracy?
Democracy in India is thriving, but the political parties need to be more open to new talent. I would say 60-40 in favour.
14. Which is your next book?
Wait and see!
15. You have written India’s biography. But which Indian’s biography you would like to write. And, why?
Not sure.
16. Is there anything else I should have asked you, but didn’t?
No.

India, A Portrait by Patrick French: A review and an interview

2011-01-19T21:14:00.008+05:30

By John Cheeran
Historian Ramachandra Guha the other day in Bangalore described Patrick French as the Gundappa Vishwanath among historian-biographers. Guha explained—Vishwanath scored a century on his Test debut. And unlike many other Indian batsmen who had begun in such a fashion but never scored a century again – Abbas Ali Baig, AG Kirpal Singh, Hanumanth Singh, Deepakh Sodhan, etc -- Vishy went on to score 13 more Test centuries.
(What Guha didn’t tell his Bangalore audience and French was that Vishwanath scored 0 in his first Test innings!)
French, too, had an impressive debut in 1994 with the biography of Younghusband-The Last Great Imperial Adventurer.
India: A Portrait is French’s fifth book and Guha considers all of French’s work worth a ton each.
French has written a very engaging account of contemporary India but to call India, A Portrait an intimate biography of 1.2 billion people is stretching ambition a bit too far.
In recent times there have been many takers for the India story. In Spite of The Gods by FT journalist Edward Luce was an early forerunner. Ramachandra Guha in his India After Gandhi, however, balances his optimism about India with the remark that “India is a 50-50 democracy.”
Only Fareed Zakaria, editor-at large at Time magazine, in recent times has cautioned that India has a Nigeria within its boundaries and advocated caution and correction to redress the fault lines.
French is in love with India and, may be, the fact that he is married to an Indian woman plays a role. The wonderful thing about India that is Bharat is that you can build any narrative – ranging from bleak to cheery -- about India since the country carries within many divergent and contradictory worlds.
French neatly divides his portrait of India into three sections --- Rashtra, Lakshmi and Samaj – and goes about meeting people and retelling stories to paint his picture. He has a great way of telling a story and his wry observations about the country such as the acronym of the now defunct Congress splinter group in Kerala, Democratic Indian Congress (Karunakaran) – DIC(K)-- makes you keep on reading. Somewhere, he describes Mahatma Gandhi as an anaconda. And he is struck by the fact that Sonia Gandhi and Indian Constituent Assembly has the same birthday and Christopher Lee, who earlier had played Dracula, played Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the film Jinnah.

But what’s essentially new in French’s India?
For those who are familiar with the India story in recent times, there are few fresh insights. To a large extent the book rests on the research French done to uncover the background of the 545 members of Lok Sabha. French shows that heredity plays a significant role in determining your chances to contest and win elections in India.
It’s nothing new. All of us knew that. It’s no big deal anymore and that’s why the Congress scion Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly admitted that if not for his father, grandmother and great grandfather he would not have been in the current political role. But French is not too critical about the role hereditary MPs (HMPs) are playing.
In an interview with this writer French says nepotism in democracy is not surprising. “Already there is backlash against nepotism in many parties, including the Congress. Reform in the Youth Congress is driven by Rahul Gandhi. If that goes well, there would be a rapid decline in nepotism,” says French.
French is so besotted with the India that he has seen from a vantage point that he ends up saying that the integration among communities in India is much better than the multiculturalism practised by Britain. French says, in Britain, multiculturalism has resulted in immigrant community ghettoes, rather than integration. He says London has more purdha-clad women than many parts of India. “No woman wears burqa in Bangalore,” says French looking at the small gathering of men and women that has assembled for the launch of India Portrait, in Park Hotel in Bangalore.
Ah, I can only say that French has not seen enough of India.
As could happen with a book of this nature, most of the stories that French talks about have been already published and discussed. A classic case in point is the story of Venkatesh the enchained quarry man in Mysore. It is quite amusing that the reporter who initially wrote the story accompanies French for a retelling of it. It is apt that French ends his book with the chapter titled it can happen only in India.
French, however, uses the story of Venkatesh to point out what he considers as the most striking feature of his India portrait—a particular kind of inhumanity.
French says this form of inhumanity is something specific to India. “It’s a kind of indifference just taken for granted and accepted,” says French. This indifference, French adds, may have roots in caste system. “In India you find impeccably clean shops, outside of it you will also find heaps of filth. This, again, is particular to India.”
In India A Portrait, French has played the dual role of historian and biographer deftly. Says French: “I’m curious about people. My focus is always on individuals but not in a judgmental way. I always give the individual a hearing. Obscure, little detail can tell you much.”
French, who has written the authorised biography of VS Naipaul, The World Is What It is, said Naipaul was quite a handful to deal with, with his roots and links to Trinidad, Britain and India.
And as a biographer which Indian interests you most?
“BR Ambedkar. He was an Indian hero, not just a Dalit hero. Personally, too, he had an interesting life, with two marriages and the second one to a Brahmin,” says French.
Here, one cannot miss the French connection.

India: A Portrait has been published by Penguin India

Will the World Cup spin in India’s favour?

2011-01-17T19:41:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran

Will the World Cup spin in India’s favour?
National selectors hope so. On Monday, they selected three specialist spinners – leg-spinner Piyush Chawla, off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin and experienced off-spinner Harbhajan Singh -- in its 15-man squad.
The third spinner knocked Kerala’s fiery fast bowler S Sreesanth and Mumbai batsman Rohit Sharma from the team.
There is an abundance of spinning talent in the side when you consider that Yuvraj Singh, Virender Sehwag, Yusuf Pathan and Suresh Raina could turn the ball. Even Sachin Tendulkar, playing in his sixth World Cup, can send down an over or two.
Focusing excessively on desi factor could back fire in the end. Because, others may do better than what Indians are supposed to do in such situations. In 1987, Graham Gooch and company swept India out of the World Cup final.
Make no mistake. It’s the batsmen who are going to win this World Cup. No matter what bowlers can try, if the pitch is not under prepared, that is.
Injuries are a worry for this side, especially in batting department. At the moment Tendulkar (hamstring), Virender Sehwag (shoulder) and Gautam Gambhir (elbow) are nursing injuries.
Let’s listen to selection committee chairman Krishnamachari Srikkanth on Monday: “We took everything into consideration. The conditions, the opponents... everything that we need to win. We are playing in India, in spin friendly conditions. There are no surprises, it’s a sensible team. We are confident we will win (the World Cup) playing in India. Our team has been playing really well in both Tests and
One-dayers. We have a strong batting lineup backed up by sound bowling. It’s a balanced team. Every team has injury concerns. It’s part and parcel of the game. The current teams form gives us a lot of confidence. The team’s doing brilliantly. We defended a small total of 190 against South Africa in South Africa. Playing at home is a lot of pressure. I pray for the players. Let’s leave the rest to God and hope for the best. The greatness of any team lies in the handling of pressure. And I hope they can repeat our feat of 83.”
Srikkanth was a member of the Indian team that won the 1983 World Cup in England.
India will play against England, South Africa, West Indies,
Bangladesh, Ireland and Netherlands in Group B.
This will be the third World Cup to be staged in the
subcontinent, after the 1987 and the 1996 editions. India qualified for the semifinals on both occasions. India was a finalist in 2003, but exited in the first round in
the last edition in the Caribbean.
India is one of the favourites for the 14-team tournament, which begins commences with a match between India and Bangladesh at Dhaka on February 19.
The final will be played in Mumbai on April 2.
Indian team for World Cup:
Mahendra Singh Dhoni (captain), Virender Sehwag
(vice-captain), Sachin Tendulkar, Gautam Gambhir, Yuvraj Singh, Suresh Raina, Virat Kohli, Yusuf Pathan, Harbhajan Singh, Ravichandran Ashwin, Piyush Chawla, Zaheer Khan, Munaf Patel, Ashish Nehra and Praveen Kumar.

Bangalore’s bleeding hearts wrapped in newsprint

2011-01-13T21:18:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
Bangalore is a wonderful city. I’m afraid t has the largest number of bleeding hearts and NGOs per square feet in India. It has ambitious Citybankesque civic agencies, including Janaagraha.
Newsmen and women, too, are a special breed in Bangalore. They empathise with readers, and espouse social causes to such an extent that often they end up tilting at windmills much in the manner of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Living in Bangalore for quite some time now and occasionally reading newspapers, I have come across several cases of campaign/community/journalism in the city. It seems to me every evening, editors are waiting for an Aarushi or Jesicca Lall so that their bleeding hearts can be wrapped in eight columns of newsprint. So I have read campaigns blaming a city compound wall for the death of a college student, a drain for the death of a young boy, a pack of stray dogs for killing an infant.
How sensible are such kind of journalism? A compound wall collapses, and someone gets trapped and dies. On a rainy day, a boy, accompanied by his mother, falls into a an uncovered drain and disappears. An unattended baby out of a brood of six gets mauled by a stray dog in a hut. All these instances are unfortunate.
But in each case the media reaction has been to blame the nebulous, less than perfect system for the tragedies. You can rail at the system because it is the easiest way. You can hang a stray dog for maiming a baby. You can hang a compound wall for killing a young college girl. You can carpet bomb a drain for gobbling up a young boy.
I find this trend rather unsettling.
The system will be always less than perfect and one has got to work on to improve it. But at the individual level, don’t we have a responsibility to take care of ourselves?
Don’t parents have a responsibility to protect their children? When you have six kids, almost all of them one or two years apart, how much attention can be given to each of them?
Don’t you have a thought before bringing young lives to this inhospitable, cruel and chaotic world? Of course, the parents of the baby who was attacked and killed by a pack of stray dogs in Bagalur in Bangalore are poor. They deserve sympathy for their financial misery but not for going without condoms. Yes, when you are breeding like dogs, you end up leading a dog’s life. Tragedy becomes complete when the father mourns the loss of his only boy among the brood! May be would not have been so heart broken had the dogs killed one of his daughters.
It is utter nonsense to argue that society has to take care of children. It doesn’t work. The right to live sounds really great in a debating room but onus is on you to stay alive. All the editors who treated the story big time on their front pages and the politicians in the state assembly who shouted against stray dogs would not step forward to help the grief-stricken family to build a house with safe doors so that another pack of stray dogs won’t bound in.
It’s a world of iniquity and injustice but everyone has to fend for himself.

‘Religion can’t hold answers to secular problems’: Interview with Omair Ahmad, author of Jimmy The Terrorist

2010-12-23T00:02:00.003+05:30

Omair Ahmad in conversation with John Cheeran

Omair Ahmad’s Jimmy The Terrorist is a partisan, political novel, set in Moazzamabad, a fictional north Indian neighbourhood that speaks of the alienation of the Muslim community. But being partisan and political in fiction is no longer considered a crime.
Ahmad, a political analyst based in New Delhi, says the title is a red herring. “The book is more about society. It is about how in small towns life revolves around small issues. We try to define everything by political terminology. Is Jamaal (Jimmy) a terrorist, a nationalist? He is a human being.”
Ahmad ends his novel by saying,”No one asked who Jamaal had been, where he was born, or what he did, but Jimmy the terrorist was listed, his death reported, and may be that is the important thing.”
These are precisely the questions that Ahmad has tried to address in his novel. At a certain level, Jimmy the terrorist is also about the author.
Ahmad argues: “Politics is important. I gave up science to study politics. I was 17 when Babri Masjid was demolished. I came into my adulthood at a time of great political conflict in India. My school was being evacuated because of the potential of a riot. Some people tried to ignore the political churning and moved on. For me it became important to understand the unfolding of events. I wanted to figure things out. The result is this novel. Jimmy in a sense goes back to very local roots. It’s not about grand events. It’s not about 9/11. It’s very local. And those are the things that matter to people in the end.”
Ahmad considers himself a lucky guy when compared to Jamaal. He says: “I didn’t get killed in a riot but one of my cousins was killed. I didn’t get roughed up by the police. But all these happened to people who matter a lot to me. It matters for me to address issues that matter to the people who do not matter.”
Jimmy The Terrorist is the Muslim narrative of recent Indian history, pockmarked by grievances, riots and pogroms.
Ahmad, however, admits that his is not the Muslim voice. He says: “I’m not trying to represent the Indian Muslim community. It’s a community too large and too diverse for me to represent, or for any one person, in the same sense that no one person can represent India.”
Ahmad believes that the problems of Indian Muslims are secular, not religious. He says: ”People are more influenced by their local situation. If you look at the geographical spread of Indian Muslims, 60 per cent live in UP, Bihar, Assam and West Bengal. All these states have gone through political and economic crises. When 60 per cent of Muslims live in these states that are not rich and prosperous, how does it matter which religion people belong to? That is why the making of Jimmy is important to me. It’s not one person. It is the society, the economics, the town and the situation that makes or breaks a person. And Jimmy is a broken person. And in my case, I’m not.”
Ahmad says though religion informs every page of Jimmy The Terrorist, the protagonist’s concerns are all secular. ”Religion is very much a part of a person’s identity. All the decisions that Jimmy ends up taking, whether his confrontation with the cops, his alienation within his school or his decision to become a typist while studying for IIM entrance examination, all these are purely secular decisions.”
Ahmad says religious authorities do not have answers to what are essentially political problems. “Of course, Jimmy talks in terms of religion. And Jimmy looks towards the maulana for some kind of understanding which he is not able to give. It is one of the most important points in the book when they talk about Dawood Ibrahim having stopped riots in Mumbai. The maulana can respond only in terms of religion. Religious authorities do not have answers to what are essentially political problems. In that sense Jimmy is a political problem.”
Ahmad becomes uneasy when people answer political questions in religious terminology. “Once you say that ‘God said this’ I have a problem. I haven’t met anyone who has interviewed God. Religion is not about political questions. As Amitav Ghosh says in his book The Imam and The Indian, people who purvey religion are not interested in religious questions. They are interested in political questions. When Osama bin Laden talks about occupation, vengeance, or killing, all those things are exquisitely political questions. He wants to be a political leader. Religion can’t hold answers to secular problems.”

Are Muslims in India one step away from breaking down like Jimmy?
“Jimmy is a single person in a large community. He is an outlier. He is not what everybody is. He starts from a broken family. He is in a broken society. His parents are in trauma. He still tries to go on, displaying resilience. At one point he breaks down. We all carry within ourselves possibilities of breaking down. Rafiq, his father, carries on despite taking a battering. Most Indians carry on despite heavy odds. I don’t want to say that Jimmys do not exist. They do. The Muslim alienation does not spring from nowhere. In its bid towards power the BJP used Muslim bashing to garner votes. It’s not that Indian Muslims went out to be alienated. It’s quite another matter whether the BJP has revised its position. But I think Muslim alienation will take care of itself.”
Ahmad also questions Mahatma Gandhi’s legacy. “Gandhi had this practice of looking at religious representatives as political representatives. So it was a maulana, pandit or sardar for him. And that’s a problem. Ask a maulana what are the problems of the Muslim community and he will say they are not religious enough. Ask a priest what are the problems of the Hindu community and he will say they don’t pray enough. If you go to a political leader who happens to be a Hindu or Muslim or Sikh, he will talk about unemployment, lack of infrastructure, etc. That’s a political problem.”
Ahmad points out that, in India, poverty matters much more than religion. “Access to opportunity is vital. You want to be poor in India and that’s the worst kind of discrimination you face. No Muslim can say he has been discriminated on the basis of religion as much as a poor man is discriminated for being poor in India. But to be Muslim and poor is a different thing,” says Ahmad.
But there have been outstanding Muslim contributions in sport, entertainment in India. Why not in politics?
“There is a distinction between how much a minority can achieve in sports, arts and in politics. Politics requires people to take one side or the other. It’s always a thing of numbers. But it’s true that democracy works better than any other system. Democracy has a problem because it tends to be majoritarian. Liberal democracy, however, tries to address this fault line through courts, press, etc. Political leadership from Muslims will take time in India. It cannot be compared with their achievements in other areas. There is still a hangover of partition in India.”

BIO
Omair Ahmad’s Jimmy the Terrorist was short-listed for the 2009 Man Asian Literary Prize. Ahmad has degrees in international politics from JNU (New Delhi) and Syracuse University (New York) and has worked for Voice of America, the British Foreign Office and the Conservative Party's National & International Security policy group. His other works are Encounters and The Storyteller’s Tale.

Business Standard Edit on Sachin Tendulkar’s 50th century

2010-12-22T22:52:00.000+05:30

Editor's note:This brilliant editorial in Business Standard gives a balanced picture of Indian cricket….It’s a shame that analysis has been abandoned in favour of mindless eulogies in most of the sport pages of Indian newspapers.

After losing the final of the 1983 World Cup to India in June, West Indies came visiting four months later. They won the first Test by an innings and 83 runs, drew the second, won the third by 138 runs, drew the fourth, won the fifth by an innings and 46 runs, and drew the sixth. It was a comprehensive drubbing handed out to the new world champions. Clive Lloyd’s marauders had had their wish in what was termed the “revenge series”. The average Indian cricket fan seems to have very little recollection of that drubbing. They do remember the series, but for the two centuries Sunil Gavaskar scored in two drawn matches. They discuss in detail Gavaskar’s century in the second Test, his 29th, an uncharacteristically breezy one off just 94 balls, which brought him on a par with Donald Bradman. In the last Test, batting at number four, as opposed to the opening slot he occupied for most of his career, Gavaskar scored 236 not out. This took him not only beyond Bradman but also beyond Vinoo Mankad’s highest individual score by an Indian, a record which had stood for three decades.
Much has changed since then. West Indies, a world-beating force, have become the whipping boys. Australia have dominated and dissipated. Generations of players have come and gone. India has learnt to win overseas and risen to the position of the number one Test team in ICC’s rankings. It is not dependent on any one player anymore, as it depended on Gavaskar in the 1970s and 80s, and on Sachin Tendulkar for the entire decade of the 1990s. But one look at the last few days’ coverage of the first Test in South Africa will make any half-informed person wonder if much has changed. To be fair, Tendulkar accomplished a stupendous feat, his 50th century in Tests. That Gary Sobers, a bonafide all-time-great, scored 26 in his career would put Tendulkar’s accomplishment in perspective. However, the celebration around it glossed over the fact that, even as Tendulkar remained unbeaten when thundershowers washed off the fag-end of the fourth day’s play, India were staring at certain defeat. Curiously, the mood was celebratory, even euphoric. Everyone was busy digging out the list of Tendulkar’s centuries, his childhood photos, and the talking heads had a field day. No one would listen to the man himself, who insisted that 50 was just another number.
This could have been forgiven in the days when the team lost regularly. After all, everyone needs something to celebrate. Tendulkar often gave us the reason. His 114 as a 19-year-old in 1992 at Perth, whose pitch had much more spite then, is celebrated by his peers as arguably his best. Well, we lost that Test by a small matter of 300 runs! This attitude can be forgiven in an underdog. No one expects them to win, so they celebrate whatever they can, and cricket offers ample scope for an individual to shine even as the team surrenders. But, to be beaten by an innings and some, while being the number one team in the world, should call for some embarrassment, some hand-wringing.

Why We Don’t Talk: A Review

2010-12-19T17:42:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
Here comes a very contemporary short story anthology that captures the flavour of Indian Writing in English (IWE). Why We Don’t Talk has contributions from 27 writers and the anthology has a distinct feminine feel to it. Some of the very well established names in IWE figure here, including Anita Nair, Chetan Bhagat, Jaishree Mishra and Usha KR.
A large chunk of them are eminently readable though there are very few stories that will stay with you once you put the book down. A majority of the stories record very intense private conversations but fail to start a dialogue with the reader. Would someone be interested in hearing out my version of events is a question that should have been with the contributors.
Amit Varma’s Urban Planning breaks from the self-indulgent mould and engages the reader right from the start. It’s an irreverent take on Indian reality where bureaucracy and political class pretend they are in control of things whereas they are as much clueless as you and me. Varma brings in humour and delineates his characters with ease and authenticity, things that determine the shelf life of a story. Joshua Newton’s Taj Mahal is a spirited attempt to peek into a familial relationship that cries out for care, touch and love. But one can’t figure out how reading a survey on people’s sexual preference and behaviour would act as the key to unlock Taj Mahal. Yes, there is a need to talk about this and much more.

Title: Why We Don’t Talk
Compiled by Shinie Antony
Publisher: Rupa and Co
Rs 295, Pages 239

Self-control is not working. Indian media need to be regulated, says BG Verghese

2010-12-12T17:21:00.003+05:30

By John Cheeran

The essential thing about BG Verghese, renowned editor and columnist, is his optimism.
“Market, and money, has taken over the Indian media. But we shall overcome,” says Verghese, who began his career in 1948 with The Times of India as a trainee reporter and went on to edit Hindustan Times (1969-75) and Indian Express (1982-86).
He is 83 and has just published his memoirs, titled aptly for a journalist who reported on India for 60 years, First Draft, Witness To The Making of Modern India.
But, then, for those who know the history of post-independent India, Verghese has been more than a witness to the making of India at its foundational levels, the vandalisation of constitutional institutions and unfolding of emergency. Verghese was a participant too.
The editor who lost his job at the Hindustan Times for daring to criticise prime minister Indira Gandhi (and he was information advisor to PM Gandhi between 1966-69) contested the post-emergency Lok Sabha elections in 1977 from Mavelikkara in Kerala, and there by took his critique from writing and reportage to the highest platform available in a democracy. It was a pivotal moment. Recalling those exhilarating campaign days with a glint in his eyes, during an interview with DNA in Bangalore, Verghese says: “In 1947, India got independence. In 1977, India got a sense of freedom.”
Now as the ethically embattled Indian media are grappling with that sense of freedom, won thanks to the backbone of those who refused to bend and crawl, Verghese advocates the regulation of the media.
Verghese says: “India has the most unregulated broadcast media in the world. There are 400 channels in the country. It is important to have regulations. Unregulated mass media are bad for India. You can drive fast only when you have sound brakes. Journalism is the most powerful tool in India but an irresponsible press is very dangerous.
The former editor says the principle of self-regulation has failed to work in India. “Self-regulation is a good thing. But I don’t think self-regulation is enough. What we need is sensible regulation. In India, libel laws are very poor. There is a need for the reformation of defamation laws. There are strong laws to control the press in the US and the UK. The government in India has tried to introduce legislation to regulate the media but lack of numbers in the Parliament has thwarted it. Whenever the matter comes up for debate, the media say it’s an infringement on their freedom which I consider a specious argument.”
Verghese points out that the Press Council of India (PCI) is a weak instrument for various reasons and cannot control the media. “The PCI should have penal powers. At the moment it’s not a court of law, but a court of ethics. Most of the larger newspapers in the country do not report the findings of the PCI. It is quite scandalous that the council did not approve the report on paid news practices by Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and K Srinivas Reddy in its entirety. Names of all offenders were deleted when the PCI approved it. That’s not the regulation one needs.”
Vergehse also reminds one about the importance of being a journalist. “The character of journalism is changing. Now you have citizen journalists. Journalists are public trustees of freedom of speech and if you betray that trust, the consequence is much graver than when a citizen journalist leads you astray. The change has to come from younger journalists and readers. The press needs to assert its integrity or else it will betray its role as a trustee of the man on the street and freedom of expression. Credibility is vital for the media whether it is print or electronic or digital. Things will definitely change. Readers and the political class are gradually realising the gravity of the situation.”
Verghese says many editors have abdicated their responsibilities. Referring to the country’s leading newspaper, he says there are no editors but managers. But he is quick to point out that the media have become frighteningly powerful despite the down sizing of the editor’s role within the media organisations.
Verghese explains the contradiction: “Everyone is frightened of the media. What you write is read by millions of people. It is because of the growth of print, broadcast, and internet platforms. Everyone gets his first information from the media, including intelligence chief and PM. Communication is swift and hence the media have become so powerful. And a great sense of responsibility goes with it. Some of these papers are fabulously rich. Some newspapers even started banks. Because of these, managements felt that editors are unnecessary since all you have to do is to fill the space between advertisements. Managers became more important and the mission of the newspaper got subordinated to profit. The balance was lost. Some editors stood their ground but many of them didn’t. Younger journalists were very upset but then they lacked the power and the ability to hold on. Some of the papers and some of the channels and individuals within in the organisations stood out. Private treaties, paid news and people cosying up to power centres have changed the media.”
Verghese adds that editors, too, have failed the test. “The image of the editor was different in the past. The editor was not supposed to be seen but read. Now they are being seen. Many of the editors run from one studio to another in the evening when they should be editing their newspapers. At the hour of newspapers going to the press many editors are missing.”

But then what explains the phenomenal readership of these newspapers?
“Firstly, they have base taste. Everything is Page 3. Then, the market. Till the economic reforms of the 90s, the scene was much stale. No foreign direct investment, no mergers, no new companies were being formed. Suddenly, all that changed. Stock market became big news. Sport became big business. They control the scene with a razzmatazz package with sections on sudokus, quizzes, comic strips, gardening, motoring, etc. The raddi value of the Times of India is more than its cover price. And they give free copies. You go to the airport. Loads of copies are piled up. Go to the railway station. Loads of copies are piled up. A lot of these circulation figures are bogus.”
Verghese is not a man of the establishment but when he says the best news in the electronic media come from Doordarshan and All India Radio it is a sharp rebuke for the breaking news channels. “It (Doordarshan) is the most honest. They do not spice it up. They give it in a straightforward fashion.”
Though the corporate-PR-media nexus has come in for flak in the aftermath of Niira Radia telephone tapes, Verghese believes that corporate India has a major role to play in the progress of India. He says: “The corporate India is part of the solution, not part of the problem. Driving out corporate India from tribal areas is a grave mistake. There has to be strong regulatory framework while allowing corporates to operate. Why do you want to shut them out? Tame them. Make them do the work you want to do. Poverty is a great enemy of the environment. People want to run away from land. They feel trapped there. Studies show that 45 per cent of farmers want to abandon agriculture because they can no longer make a living out of it. They want education for their children. They need jobs.”
Such unconventional but original positions make Verghese’s arguments compelling. And a careful reading of First Draft, his memoirs, proves as much. Varghese says the prime reason behind his memoirs is to fill the vast blanks in people’s memory, including that of decision makers, about the history of post-independent India. Verghese says: “You could create all sorts of problems because of this blank space. You could misread history. People don’t realise that Kashmir only acceded to India but never merged. When Omar Abdullah said that, people were aghast.”
As Verghese puts it, In First Draft, he tries to give a worm’s eye view of the post-Independent India. “I wanted to portray the leaders that I came into contact with –Nehru, Indira Gandhi, etc--, warts and all. They must be properly and honestly assessed. You may not agree with many things they say. They may even say foolish things. But you do not write that. How can you tarnish the image of the great man or the great lady? We complain that some people want to rewrite history. But we rewrite it ourselves because in the first place we don’t write it straight,“ he says.
The final draft of the Indian media, let’s hope, readers will write. We shall overcome.

Radia tapes and Indian journalism: Tunku Varadarajan in The Daily Beast

2010-12-01T20:12:00.002+05:30

Years from now, earnest journalism majors will study an episode that aired on Indian television Tuesday, in which Barkha Dutt, a massively influential but ethically embattled TV news anchor, submit herself to public inquisition by a panel of her peers. Four flinty journalists grilled the anchor on the extent of her relationship with one of India’s most influential (and, some would say, murky) corporate lobbyists, with whom the anchor was clandestinely taped talking about how to get a pliable politician a job in the Indian cabinet—a placement that would have benefitted the lobbyist’s corporate clients to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. (One assumes that clips of the inquisition will be posted on Ms. Dutt’s NDTV website.)
Think—and I offer this rough-hewn equivalent only to bring the matter to life for an American readership—of Katie Couric as the anchor, caught on tape talking to the flack for Halliburton, on the subject of getting Halliburton’s preferred candidate the job of defense secretary in the run-up to a major war. And think, then, of an hour-long segment in which Couric sits down with, say, Charles Krauthammer, Fred Hiatt, Ken Auletta, and Katrina vandel Heuvel, and submits herself to on-air questioning on the subject—with the aim of explaining, as Dutt has sought to do, on Twitter, Facebook, and in a press release, how her conversation with the lobbyist was within the bounds of ethically acceptable journalism.
Dutt has said, in a nutshell, that the uber-influential lobbyist was just a source, and that she was stringing the source along in order to milk her for as much information as she could get—both immediately, and as editorial investment for the future. Although there is absolutely no evidence that Dutt stood to gain financially from discussing how to place the lobbyist’s man in the Indian cabinet, the conversation reeked of an unseemly proximity between journalist, lobbyist, and corporate interests, so much so that there are vociferous, and entirely reasonable, campaigns to bounce Dutt, as well as many other senior journalists who were also caught on tape, out of a job. The fact that the journalists canoodling on tape with the lobbyist were a “Who’s Who” of sorts of New Delhi’s journalistic elite has fueled a sense of public chagrin that will not easily be quelled. Indians are cynical by nature; and so, when they feel betrayed by the few figures they trust, the disappointment is acute—and irrepressible.
Indian journalism is regarded by many in America (including by my own sainted editor, Tina Brown) as vibrant, rich, and healthy; by contrast, journalism in the West is believed to be in the grip of an existential and financial crisis. But the recent lobbyist-journalist-politician scandal in India (of which everything you could wish to read can be found in Outlook magazine, and here, in this incisively compendious newspaper piece by my brother, an editor at The Hindu newspaper) has dynamited the Potemkin village that is Indian journalism. What has looked to us to be healthy, roseate, and vigorous is, in fact, rotten, corrupt, and frequently amoral.
Indian journalism is woefully bereft of an institutional ethical architecture, relying instead on the ethical instincts of individual journalists. As such, there is a sort of ethical free market in operation, in which readers or viewers make up their own minds on whether so-and-so can be trusted as a columnist, whether this or that anchor can be relied upon to hold no brief for politicians or corporations, whether this newspaper or that can be trusted to report the news without fear or favor. As N. Ram, editor of The Hindu, pointed out in a recent debate on Indian TV, the journalists in question, here, would not have survived five minutes at The New York Times, or the FT.
In truth, Indian journalism is a vast field inhabited by a multitude of interests and abilities, an anarchic Klondike in which fortunes and reputations are being made, and in which the kind of anal but indispensable ethical standards that make the better stratum of American journalism reliable are broadly absent. Many major Indian newspapers practice something called “paid news,” with unofficial rate cards, in which people and companies can get their stories and photographs on Page 1, or their books reviewed, on payment of a fee to the news corporation in question. Politicians, too, must pay, particularly at election time, to get up-front coverage. In the same vein, Indian journalists seldom, if ever, disclose their interests in stories they write about. (An Indian journalist once berated me for “all this American disclosure crap.”)
There is, also, a curious demographic problem: Virtually all the super-elite journalists in New Delhi and Bombay are from families with corporate or bureaucratic connections, men and women who would, in previous generations, have entered the elite bureaucracy themselves, whether it be the Indian Foreign Service or the Indian Administrative Service. Journalism today offers a quicker and more effective route to power, especially now that the bureaucratic services have been opened up to a wider swath of Indians as a result of affirmative action. In essence, the “babalog”—the well-born—who used to dominate the country’s administrative cadres are now crammed into the media. It is the one avenue of real power for India’s otherwise somewhat disenfranchised elites, in the sense that they can’t ever get elected to parliament. So they have turned the media into a form of socio-cultural Establishment and feel quite at home with the other “establishments,” whether business or political, that are to be found in modern, democratic India, regarding theirs as in no way inferior.
A final word: India’s media is still an insulated and protected sector. To this day, foreign media companies cannot own more than 26 percent of an Indian imprint. This has made for an insular press, a corrupt press, an Indian media untested not merely against global standards of journalistic craft, but also against Western standards of journalistic ethics. Dutt, surely, has a heckuva lot of explaining to do. But she’s not the only one in that position—by any stretch.
Tunku Varadarajan is a national affairs correspondent and writer at large for The Daily Beast. He is also the Virginia Hobbs Carpenter Fellow in Journalism at Stanford's Hoover Institution and a professor at NYU's Stern Business School. He is a former assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal.

Radia Tapes and Indian journalism: Siddharth Varadarajan in The Hindu

2010-12-01T20:10:00.000+05:30

As squeamish schoolchildren know only too well, dissection is a messy business. Some instinctively turn away, others become nauseous or scared. Not everyone can stomach first hand the inner workings of an organic system. Ten days ago, a scalpel — in the form of a set of 104 intercepted telephone conversations — cut through the tiniest cross-section of a rotting cadaver known as the Indian Establishment. What got exposed is so unpleasant that several major newspapers and television channels that normally scramble to bring “breaking” and “exclusive” stories have chosen to look the other way. Their silence, though understandable, is unfortunate. Even unforgivable.
After all, the tape recordings of Niira Radia's phone conversations have come to light against the backdrop of the recent Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) report on the allocation of 2G spectrum, which demonstrated how the rules were arbitrarily bent by the then Telecom Minister, A. Raja, in order to favour a handful of private companies at government expense. Among the beneficiaries of Mr. Raja's raj were Anil Ambani. And also Ratan Tata. In one of the tapes, an unidentified interlocutor asks Ms Radia, whose clients include both Mr. Tata and Mukesh Ambani, why “you people [i.e. the Mukesh Ambani group] are supporting [Raja] like anything ... when the younger brother [Anil Ambani] is the biggest beneficiary of the so called spectrum allocation”. “Issue bahut complex hai,” Ms Radia replies. “Mere client Tatas bhi beneficiary rahein hain (my client, the Tatas, have also been a beneficiary).”
Apart from telecom, the tapes also provide valuable insight into the gas dispute between the two Ambani brothers. This was a dispute in which Mukesh Ambani made skillful use of the “gas is a national resource” argument with a pliant media even as he used his influence with individual MPs to try and orchestrate a massive tax concession for his company from the same national resource, Krishna-Godavari (KG) basin natural gas.
In an interview to NDTV and the Indian Express on Saturday — two media houses that have so far avoided covering the tapes — Ratan Tata has called the recordings a “smokescreen” designed to hide the real truth. He is wrong. Utterly wrong. No doubt we know very little about who leaked the recordings and why these were cherry-picked from a wider set of 5,000 recordings the Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax authorities made as part of their surveillance of Ms Radia. But even if the story they tell is partial and designed to expose only a fraction of the corporate lobbying which has been going on, we would be naive to ignore the contents of the tapes or be dismissive about their significance.
In the science fiction film, “The Matrix”, Morpheus tells Neo, “You're here because you know there's something wrong with the world.” The Matrix, he says, is the world that has been pulled over everyone's eyes to blind them from the truth that they are slaves. He offers Neo the choice of a blue or red pill. “You take the blue pill and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill ... and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
The Niira Radia audio archive loaded on to the Internet by Open and Outlook magazines last week is the red pill of our time. It reveals the source codes, networks, routers, viruses and malware that make up the matrix of the Indian State. The transmission of information, also known as “news”, between different nodes is vital for the system to work efficiently. The news is also the medium for reconciling conflicts between different sectors of the establishment. If you hear the recordings, you begin to understand the truth about the Wonderland that is India. No wonder there are many amongst us who would rather swallow the blue pill. For once you go in, the only way out is to keep digging. And yes, the rabbit-hole runs deep.
So deep, for example, that we hear a Member of Parliament, N.K. Singh, who is meant to represent the people and the state who voted for him, brazenly batting for a single-man corporate constituency, Mukesh Ambani.
In one recording, Mr. Singh tells Ms Radia of the firefighting he is doing on behalf of Mr. Ambani to ensure a tax concession the finance minister had announced in the 2009 budget for gas production is made applicable retrospectively. Ms Radia says she has killed news stories about the Rs.81,000 crore super profit Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) would make were that to happen but Mr. Singh is more concerned about what happens in Parliament during the debate on the Finance Bill. His fear is that if Opposition MPs make a noise about a largesse being given to one company, the finance minister would be on the defensive and the prospect of extending the concession retrospectively would not even arise. Mr. Singh accuses BJP leader Arun Shourie of being on Anil Ambani's side and reveals how he has managed to get Mr. Shourie replaced as the BJP's lead speaker by Venkaiah Naidu. How well does Mukesh know Venkaiah, asks Mr. Singh, who is a Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar on a Janata Dal (United) – JD(U) ticket. Ms Radia replies that a senior RIL executive, P.M.S. Prasad, knows Mr. Naidu well. “Then I am going to get him flown in today to talk to Venkaiah,” Mr. Singh says, “because if he is the first speaker, and he already takes a party line, then it will be very difficult for Shourie in his second intervention, to take a different line. Then we have to orchestrate who will speak, you know, this is the immediate problem right now. Because, frankly, if this doesn't go through, this tax thing, then it's a major initiative taken that then fails to materialise.”
We don't know if Mr. Prasad flew down and met Mr. Naidu as N.K. Singh wanted him to do. But the BJP leader's speech in Parliament two days later has this telltale suggestion: “The Bay of Bengal has become the new North Sea of India. Government departments should not be seen quarrelling whether mineral oil is a natural gas or not. Whatever concessions [are] needed for infrastructure, exploration ... are connected with the energy security of the country.” This was a veiled reference to the Petroleum Ministry's letter to the Finance Ministry asking for natural gas to be given the same tax concessions available to oil retrospectively and not just from the New Exploration Licensing Round (NELP) VIII round which would exclude RIL's KG basin output. A request the revenue secretary had turned down.
In other recordings, we see journalists and editors, who are meant to report and analyse what is going on objectively, offering to become couriers and stenographers and foot soldiers in the war one set of corporate fat cats is waging against another. We also see a political fixer, Ranjan Bhattacharya, whose USP once was his familial proximity to the Bharatiya Janata Party, seamlessly open a line to the Congress and go about his business as if election results don't matter. He boasts about his proximity to Ghulam Nabi Azad and his ability to send a message to “SG, boss”, a reference to the Congress president. He then quotes Mukesh Ambani telling him the Congress party is now “apni dukan”. Mr. Bhattacharya may have been lying about his influence but then the formidable Ms Radia is anything but a dupe.
We also hear in the tapes an iconic businessman, Ratan Tata, who today makes sanctimonious statements about crony capitalism and the danger of India becoming a banana republic, lobbying through his PR agent, Ms Radia, for A. Raja to be given the Telecom portfolio.
If the allocation of spectrum by the Manmohan Singh government in 2008 and 2009 is one of the biggest scams in independent India, then the involvement of businessmen like Ratan Tata, Sunil Mittal and Mukesh Ambani in lobbying for their choice of telecom minister when the UPA government returned to power in May 2009 is surely a very important part of the back-story. But it is a story none of the journalists who liaised with Ms Radia during this time chose to report. More than the squabble within the Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (DMK) or between the DMK and the Congress, the involvement of India's biggest companies in the process of cabinet formation was the story that should have been headlined. Ms Radia talks of Sunil Mittal and AT&T using Times Now to push out stories about Dayanidhi Maran being the frontrunner for telecom and Mr. Raja being in disfavour. Her own strategy appears to have been to use her relationship with Barkha Dutt and Shankar Aiyar to get the opposite message out onto news channels like NDTV and Headlines Today.
Instead of using Ms Radia as a “source” for covering the DMK, her role, and the role of her principal clients, in trying to push for a minister who was seen even then as tainted ought to have been exposed. But then Delhi is a hothouse of power, and proximity to power deadens one's reflexes and weakens one's nerves. What Indian journalism needs more than anything else today is distance. From both politicians and industrialists. It is never too late to swallow that red pill.

Lost And Found by CP Surendran: A Review

2010-11-28T21:42:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
CP Surendran’s Lost And Found can be read as a Bollywood script with gravitas. For someone as accomplished with words as CP, I should say at the outright, that the novel disappoints, again. May be, expectations were too many to begin with.
CP is many things -- poet, journalist, columnist and that may have complicated the role of being a novelist for him. His first novel, Iron Harvest, rooted in Kerala tackled the dreams of the rebellious youth during Emergency, but was lost in a running stream of imagery.
As a journalist you are condemned to a life of cursing and questioning and every story that lands on editing table can be material for a novel. In fact, newspaper stories often defy imagination.
CP’s situation deserves readers’ sympathy. Being a journalist and novelist it would have been hard to stave off the temptation of making use of events during 26/11 for a work of fiction. That CP dared to look back on 26/11 and Bombay, not much in anger but in compassion, understanding and reconciliation both at personal and political levels, is a praiseworthy act.
The dread with which one approached Lost And Found disappeared as taut sentences spread their ink. When CP writes “The future seems extravagant, unnecessary” you may agree with him.
But to make use of the trite Bollywood theme of twin brothers separated at birth coming together as the pivot of Lost And Found must have taken a leap of faith for the novelist. A terrorist from Pakistan wielding an AK-47 bumps into his twin brother, biological mother and alleged father in a Bandra apartment moments before he prepares to put his foot on the doors of heaven. Jihad meets its comeuppance in the outcome of a one-night stand of a Malayali couple.
Even dark humour needs to have its boundaries and I wonder whether CP wanted Lost And Found to be read as a spoof for our troubled times.
Yes, there are redeeming features, too. In Lost And Found, Bombay conveniently becomes the canvas for CP’s take on journalism, religion, fundamentalism, Islam, and broken relationships. They would have made excellent reading as newspaper columns – in fact Placid Hari Oadnnur’s profile of freelance photographer Udit Rai, The Dog of Small Things, is outrageously brilliant-- but not as a gripping narrative.
A farrago of characters and a bhang-inspired plot make for Lost And Found. Lakshmi Menon the porn writer, who was raped in a Mumbai local train many years ago, kidnaps her alleged rapist from a party and brings him home the night before terrorists from Karachi land on Mumbai shore to script 26x11. It was a beginning but the carefully wrought sarcasm and cynicism get washed away in the desperate effort of the author to justify his cast of characters. Yes, in India and Pakistan a lot of things do happen. Even on Bollywood screens. What Lost And Found wants its readers to believe is much more than that, a task in which CP has failed them again.

The China Syndrome By Harsh V Pant: A Review

2010-11-22T23:36:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
The problem with India’s diplomatic class is that it does not believe in the argument of power but in the power of argument. The power of argument does not take you far and the rise and rise of China is an example for that.
The Chinese Communist party knows what it wants and goes about achieving it without any moral rhetoric. Not for nothing then Deng Xiaoping said: “It does not matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice.” China deals with anyone and everyone if it serves its agenda. It has no qualms about striking strategic partnerships with Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe or dictatorships in Africa or Asia, including the Burmese junta in India’s backyard. It doles out aid to authoritarian regimes in Asia, Africa and Latin America with no strings attached so that it can get what it seeks, be it energy or geopolitical advantage. It has powered Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions, is in many energy deals with Iran and buys arms and ammunition from Israel. It, apparently, knows how to project power.
On the other hand, India’s diffidence in power projections is creating a perception in South East Asia that there is nothing to fear from New Delhi.
Harsh V Pant, who teaches at King’s College in London, in the Department of Defence Studies, flays the Indian establishment in his new book The China Syndrome, for not having a consistent, reasoned policy to deal with the dragon.
Pant is quite blunt in his assessment of India, especially in the backdrop of the recent chatter of India taking its rightful place in the comity of nations, along with the US and China and says India should stop talking about becoming a global leader. He adds that no one takes such claims seriously when India has been unable to get a grip on its own neighbourhood.
Pant excoriates the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) for not conceptualizing a long term strategy, especially when negotiating with China. So one day China is India’s enemy No.1, then becomes a good neighbour and later wooed as India’s greatest neighbour.
Pant chides prime minister Manmohan Singh for buying into the liberal fallacy that assumes only if nations trade with each other more, the world would become more prosperous and peaceful. Sino-Indian relations rely too much on this premise, forgetting geopolitical narrative. So even though China is India’s largest trading partner, India’s relationship with the middle kingdom remains uneasy.
India’s inability or rather unwillingness to see the world as it is rather than as it should be has become the bane of its foreign policy, argues Pant.
He writes that China is not a malevolent, sinister international entity out there to demolish India. It is a state which is simply pursuing its own strategic interests in a hard-headed fashion on its way to achieving the status of a super power.
Tibet lies at the heart of the deep distrust between India and China. Pant correctly observes that the world is not willing to confront on China on any issue. That makes Sino-India relationship all the more challenging.
2010 marks 60 years of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1951 should have led to a fundamental reassessment regarding China’s motives with respect to India. And, India lost the 1962 war with China.
Yet, even in 2010, China’s gradual encroachment of Indian territory continues to surprise the Indian leadership, writes Pant.
India needs to urgently review its defence prepardness vis-à-vis China. The real challenge for India, however, lies in China’s rise as a military power. In the post-26/11 scenario, it has been pointed out that India seems to have lost even its conventional superiority over Pakistan.
The very fact that the United States is willing to back India in its quest for a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council stems from the Obama administration’s strategy to contain an ever rising China, militarily as well as commercially, making use of India as its bulwark in the East. It is now for the Indian establishment to play the game.

Harbhajan and the art of scoring runs

2010-11-15T19:51:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
Harbhajan Singh has hit another Test century.
The century (111) in Hyderabad is his second consecutive knock against New Zealand in the ongoing series.
Last week in the first Test at Ahmedabad Harbhajan had scored 115 in the second innings and 69 in the first innings. These three consistent scores against a decent international bowling attack cannot be viewed as an aberration.
No wonder then that former Indian skipper Rahul Dravid argued on Sunday that the off-spinner from Chandigarh could be evolving into an Indian Gary Sobers. May be, may be not.
Well, Dravid can be, at times, quite magnanimous to his teammates. There is, absolutely, no shades of the West Indian all-rounder in Harbhajan Singh. But Harbhajan has improved a lot as a batsman. He has succeeded when top order batsmen failed to come to the rescue of India as in the second innings of the first Test in Ahmedabad.
What explains Harbhajan’s sudden success as a batsman?
Before getting into that debate let me state that Harbhajan has failed in his primary responsibility as the seniormost spinner in bowling out New Zealanders. Harbhajan took four wickets in the New Zealand first innings in Hyderabad but could take only one in Ahmedabad.
There is little doubt that Harbhajan belongs to the Virender Sehwag School of Batting. The Sehwag School of Batting believes in belting the ball, without getting bogged down by the consequences and the context of the match. It does not observe the niceties of wearing out the bowling attack. When Sehwag succeeds, he invariably hammers a big score or else he falls too early to leave the Indian innings wobbling.
In Hyderabad, Harbhajan, a No.8 batsman, has top scored for India with 111 off 116 balls. His strike rate of 95.68 in this innings is much better than that of Sehwag (80). And to consider that Harbhajan top scored for an India with a batting line-up that boasts of Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag, Dravid and VVS Laxman!
Batting is a much refined task compared to bowling. But a fearless approach wins you more than half the battle. You cannot blame Harbhajan if he had thought of emulating the raw, robust approach of Sehwag in plundering runs. If Harbhajan the batsman attempts a wild shot and gets out in the process he has still opportunity to redeem himself as a bowler. His existence as a cricketer and a member of the Indian squad does not hinge on the number of runs he scores. Such knowledge can be extremely useful for a cricketer who has wielded the long handle in the past and has a devil-may-care attitude to life in general.
Whereas specialist batsmen are hampered at the crease by the responsibility to score runs, the lack of any such burden sets free the likes of Harbhajan at the batting crease. But, then, why other bowlers in the side are not able to reproduce the success of Harbhajan?
May be, they are not willing to walk that extra mile. It is important to recall at this juncture that former Indian captain and leg spinner Anil Kumble said in an interview that since they (Srinath, Kumble and Venkatesh Prasad) are bowlers they do not want to stay at the batting crease and risk injuries and thereby jeopardize their career. The approach that it is the job of batsmen to bring home the runs is fine up to a point. But, there is no doubt that Harbhajan has no such reservations when it comes to cocking a snook at the opposition.
Yes, some skills to improvise while going for strokes do count. Hand-eye co-ordination, too, is important. But a big heart for fight counts much more than that.

Desiree by Annemarie Selinko: A review

2010-11-12T18:39:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
23 years later, I re-read Desiree, the historical novel by Annemarie Selinko. Desiree – Citizeness Bernadine Eugenie Desiree Clary-, daughter of a Marseille silk merchant, was the first love of emperor Napoleon Bonaparte.
Regarded as the most fascinating historical novel since Gone With the Wind, Desiree is an engaging and powerful read but, I guess, largely remains faithful to historical facts.
Emperor Napoleon and his rival marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte played huge roles in the making of European history in the 18th and 19th century. But this spunky and loyal girl played an equally important role in the lives of these two men and, eventually, became the queen of Sweden.
Everyone who knows about Napoleon also knows about queen Josephine. But not many know about Desiree, who as a 14-year-old, emptied her piggybank and gave a bankrupt, 24-year-old general Napoleon 98 francs to make his journey to Paris to plead his cause with army top brass. Before the world bet on Napoleon, Desiree had the first pick.
Successful men are opportunists and Napoleon did not shy when opportunities beckoned him in Paris. He married Josephine to make his forays in the Parisian labyrinth and further his grand strategy.
Annemarie Selinko writes the novel as a diary kept by Desiree. Its tone is intimate and direct. The simple, unaffected and short sentences convey the romance and breathlessness of, first the French revolution and then that of vaulting ambition of generals. In Desiree, Selinko gets quite closer to a woman’s heart, if such a thing is ever possible.
The events that Desiree is privileged to witness are highly political but this is not a political novel. It’s a novel about trust, love and honour and how we react when confronted by events bigger than ourselves. It’s a must-read for you.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson: A Review

2010-11-08T20:17:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
The Finkler Question raises many questions on morality, identity and friendship. Howard Jacobson’s Man Booker Prize winning novel is witty and engaging but not an easy read.
Anyone who can write this line, “Death was his only serious rival,” must be good.
And, honestly, I don’t find that funny.
Jacobson, while portraying a gentile and former BBC worker Julian Treslove’s search for his imagined Jewish self in the company of his Jewish friends, gives an unconventional novel, a novel of political and moral relevance when pitted with today’s realities.
It’s about Jewishness but then it is much more than that.
In Jacobson’s own words: “This (The Finkler Question) is a novel about love, loyalty, memory and loss. Mainly it is about the way these things impinge on person to person love, but it is also about the way they impinge upon ideas, and Israel is an important contemporary idea.”
They say The Finkler Question is a comic novel but I find it deeply unsettling, and engaging in that sense. The fact that Jacobson is a Jew does not stop him mocking at the chosen people. But through Sam Finkler, the ashamed Jewish philosopher, Jacobson exposes the hypocrisy of those who hate Jewish people simply for being Jews and captures the fear of another wave of anti-Jewishness flowing from anti-Zionism.
The changing equations among the three friends – two Jews --Libor, Finkler -- and Gentile Treslove –,indeed, hold answers to our own dilemmas in this shifty world.

Dead thinkers, living ideas: A talk with historian and author Ramachandra Guha

2010-10-31T18:56:00.005+05:30

Author and historian Ramachandra Guha calls Makers of Modern India, a book edited and introduced by him, as the public face of the Indian political tradition. In an interview with John Cheeran, Guha talks about how his 19 thinker-reformers hold a mirror to contemporary India and the rest of the world.

Excerpts:

Dead thinkers, but living ideas. Was that the guiding principle behind this new anthology?

Yes. But I should add something else -- prose that is still accessible. There are many whose ideas are expressed in archaic, antiquarian prose. For example, spiritualists. We have Vivekananda, Aurobindo, Sree Narayana Guru. But translations of their work come across as stiff prose. The language, clarity was also important to me.

Why this book matters?

This book is a beginning of a conversation. It is not an end. This is an attempt to open up a new path. In one volume it gives a broad, comprehensive picture of our political tradition to readers. It has most of the important thinkers but not all.
The second objective of the book is to persuade other historians to dig deeper. Only Gandhi’s works are easily accessible. We don’t have Rajagopalachari, Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan (JP). What have I done is only selections. One could have an entire volume on each one of these thinkers. Also, I want to encourage more detailed research into these aspects of our political and intellectual history. It’s a kind of guide for average reader and an invitation to my fellow historians.
You always take Indian democracy for granted. Indian unity, you take it for granted. Indian democracy is alive as a result of the works of these men and women Makers of Modern India talks about. This book makes us aware of our tradition and critical appreciation.

Why were these 19 political thinkers chosen?
They are politicians and social reformers. They must be thinkers and doers. And their writings must be original. So I have left out Subash Chandra Bose and Vallabhbhai Patel. Dead thinkers, living ideas and readable prose. Whether in English or translation they are talking about important issues. These 19 people wrote about all kind of issues. But I have selected only works that are still relevant to us. Some of Gandhi’s writings are not relevant. Same goes for C Rajagopalachari. What CR wrote about Ramayana, Mahabharata and all that does not matter now. I only selected those writings that are relevant to democracy, social life and the situation of India today.

You have written in the epilogue of Makers of Modern India that Tilak, Jinnah and Golwalkar have lost their relevance to the realities of today. Still they figure among the chosen 19?

Because they had a defining impact on modern India, positively and negatively. Jinnah and Golwalkar negatively. Because Jinnah set out certain positions people like Gandhi and Nehru were forced to emphasise the plural, multi-religious nature of India. Likewise with Golwalkar, from the side of Hindu extremism.
So they defined the parameters of the debate, they shaped how people responded. And in a negative sense, they influenced India. So they were also makers of India. Tilak was a great leader of freedom struggle and called for political emancipation and we have that now. In that sense Tilak is not so relevant to contemporary India.

Some surprising omissions from your list of 19 are Bose and Patel. Don’t they qualify as thinking politicians?

Yes. Their writings are very dull. They are not readable. Bose wrote a book called India’s Struggle but it is extremely dreary and verbose. Such writing would turn off people.
It is very important for a historian to guide the reader. So I have given references to biographies of Bose, Patel and, similarly, of Indira Gandhi.
Even though these people do not figure in my book, if a reader wants to find about more about them, they can find it.

Then, these 19 are only choices, not endorsements of a historian?

Yes, these are not endorsements. The book captures the diversity of thought. There is a wonderful essay by Lohia on English, arguing that it should be banished. The book also has an equally wonderful defence of English by Rajagopalachari. So what matters is the quality of debate on either side. Similarly, on caste. Gandhi says the primary responsibility for ending untouchability is with upper castes. But Ambedkar says it is not so and we will organise from below. So, competing perspectives are there.
On economic policy, Nehru and Rajagopalachari offer different views. The quality, diversity, flavour and richness of the debate which is essential for our democracy you get in Makers of Modern India. Without pushing my ideas down the reader’s throat, I guide them gently.

One can’t find a single factor binding your 19 makers of modern India. As you have said, there is only a connected political tradition, disputatious in nature, that informs the book…

There is a continuous referring back to the past. Tagore refers back to Rammohan Roy. Phule is reacting to Gokhale. A whole section is on Gandhi and his critics. Hamid Dalwai answers to Rammohan Roy and Syed Ahmed Khan. There is a continuous, self-referential approach.
They have made departures from what had happened before. I have tried to bring back the tradition of dispute into the book. Most of our people don’t understand that how rich and productive our traditions, political debates were.
Right now debates are very superficial, especially on television channels. You find crude, simple minded, superficial, ill-informed debates on major issues and public policies. It could be on affirmative action, it could be on terrorism, globalisation, functioning of parties, democracy, election, etc. The whole debate is ill-informed and shrill. I want to write many more books like this. Entire volumes on Rajagopalachari, Lohia, Dalwai and many others. This book, I hope, will lead to a much more improved political debate.

You are a great admirer of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru. Apart from these two, who among the 19 you are fascinated with?

Most of the people I admire. Sixteen out of 19 them I admire. What has happened is that because it is so fashionable to attack Nehru today from all directions, left wing, right wing, because I have good things to say about Nehru, people focus more on that. Actually, as I said, I have a very, broad-minded, catholic approach to history. To me the five greatest Indians are Gandhi, Ambedkar, Nehru, Tagore and Rajagopalachari. Gandhi I would put slightly above others. Gandhi had a universal reach. Gandhi and Ambedkar are regarded as rivals but I admire both. Today we need most of these people. When I make some qualified defence of Nehru, in the face of concerted attack on him, people say I’m a worshipper of Nehru.
In my book, India After Gandhi, I pay a great deal of attention to the contribution of Patel. Patel played as an important a role that Nehru played in the early years. So in that sense there are a lot many Indians that I admire.

Do you think Nehru should have quit as prime minister much earlier than he did?

That’s a good question. He almost quit in 1958. In 1958, he took a long holiday – three weeks he went to Kashmir and thought about it, and almost quit. Possibly he could have nurtured a successor and we can’t say for sure. But it is sad that people think they can continue for ever. In Tamil Nadu there is Karunanidhi and LK Advani thinks he can become prime minister the next time.
It’s my view and I still stick to that Manmohan Singh should have quit in March –April 2009. He should have done only one term. He came in at a very difficult time, right? He came in 2004 against a backdrop of real polarisation of religious feeling, Gujarat riots, Kargil war, global terror, etc. If you look at the whole background he came in, we were really worried, all of us.
In March 2009, I actually met him and said “you should either come through Lok Sabha as a person in his own right or step down, saying that “I came at a difficult time and did a good five years. My work is done.” But the desire to cling on to power is there. And people now forget that he did a difficult job quite well when there was fear about many levels. So I think when to retire is a very difficult choice. In all spheres. Not just in politics. You know, Verghse Kurian, who contributed so much but eventually was kicked out of an organisation (Anand, Gujarat) which he built for sticking on even when he was a liability. Look at cricketer Kapil Dev and how long he kept Srinath out of the Indian team. It is very hard to judge when to retire. Mandela (Nelson) retired at the right time and transferred power. Yes, may be after two terms, Nehru should have retired in 1959 and thought of a transition.
Manmohan Singh is a good example (of not retiring at the right time). Now he is more of a lame duck prime minister. Tony Blair needed to be kicked out, so was Margaret Thatcher, she stayed 13 years and had to go finally.

While putting together this anthology, were there any surprising discoveries in terms of ideas, and even thinkers? For readers like me, Hamid Dalwai as a Muslim Nehru, is a revelation… You have done a similar thing in Corner of A Foreign field with Palwankar Baloo…

Surprising discoveries, in terms of ideas, certainly. In terms of thinkers, Hamid Dalwai is one. It was surprising and refreshing. I discovered him at a time when he was almost forgotten. The themes, yes. Rajagopalachari, I had read only as a critic of the licence-quota raj. But when I read deeply, I found his ideas about English language and his warnings about the need to control money power in elections highly pertinent.
Then there is Jayaprakash Narayan (JP). We know JP for his opposition to Indira Gandhi. But I found JP as a defender of ethnic minorities, including Kashmiris, Nagas, etc and these are still relevant today. For me, too, this book was a journey of education and understating. In that sense a quite pleasurable journey. But it was tough too. How much to keep of individual people’s writings in this book. There were many brilliant excerpts from Ambedkar and Gandhi which I could not include because of space constraints. All those decisions were to be made.
I want this book to be ready by everyone. Already enquiries have come about translations into Malayalam, Tamil, so that it will reach a wider audience.
I discovered Dalwai by accident. I saw his book called Muslim Politics In A Secular India at pavement in Bombay. And started reading him. This was a very long time ago. It must have been at least 15 years ago. The book was published in 1968 but now totally out of print. I was fascinated by his foresight. Then I had the good fortune to meet his translator Dilip Chitre, the late Marathi poet. So he told me more about Dalwai. He gave me the other articles by Dalwai and spoke about his background. How he came from the Konkan coast and all.

Were Dalwai’s writings the most difficult to access?

All were difficult. This book is the result of 15 years’ thinking and reflecting. It is not that I decided to compile the book 15 years ago. But for the last 15 years I have been reading and reflecting. If you look up the acknowledgements given in the book, you will see a quite few eccentric ones -- I have thanked Nehru Memorial Museum, and its staff. And I have also thanked secondhand bookshops. Makers of Modern India is based on books and pamphlets which are not available even at the most prestigious of libraries.
So 15 years ago, I was interested in these thinkers. Then 10 years ago, I started working on India After Gandhi. Then of course I had a long term interest in Gandhi. I’m now writing a two-volume biography of Gandhi. So all these things gave me a deeper understanding of these thinkers. So I decided I should bring all these in an accessible form for readers to learn about this extraordinary array of thinker-reformers. But this happened over a fairly long period of time. Over a long period of time, ideas were germinated and developed.
Then I started working on the book. How to select these thinkers, how to organise them and how to write the introduction.
I was working on India After Gandhi from 1999 onwards. In 2005 October, I published a critical review of Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian. Then he replied to that. There was a debate. Then, consequentially, I decided to make my point.
It was a matter of curiosity. The world of emperor Asoka and the situations in the 19th and 20th centuries were different. The issues we are talking about now, gender equality, caste, freedom of the press, economic policy, industrialisation, linguistic diversity were unknown to Asoka. So in a sense those ideas of Asoka’s times were forgotten and not relevant to modern India.

You have, by careful selection, given fresh insights to these Makers of Modern India. For example, JP comes across as a defender of ethnic minorities, including Kashmiris, Nagas, etc. JP writes: “Constitutional integration has little meaning in the absence of emotional integration. It is impossible to hold down by force any sizeable population permanently. If we continue to do it, we cannot look the world straight in the face and talk of democracy and justice and peace.”

JP is so prescient and extraordinary in his views. How contemporary it is. It was written in 1964.

How do you think our political establishment would react to it?

The person this article should be shown to is LK Advani and ask him what he thinks about JP’s views. In the present establishment there are some sensible people, including the prime minister who thinks Kashmir is a genuine issue. But for political reasons they cannot openly acknowledge it but they know that it (Kashmir) cannot be permanently held down by force. Army and the security apparatus may want to do it. But we want emotional integration, not forcible, legal or political integration. JP’s article on Kashmir is a classic example of dead thinkers and living ideas.

A striking absence of gloom marks your writings about modern India. You are a great believer in the India story. Despite a plethora of problems you still consider India the most interesting country in the world. How pertinent is the Indian experience and makers of modern India to the rest of the world?

No, I’m not. That’s not true. My book says India is a 50-50 democracy. I’m a severe critic of our fault-lines. I’m an Indian democrat who wants to redeem and improve Indian democracy. You know, I don’t think in black and white, all right? There is a CIA view of the world and left-wing extremist view of the world. Leftwing extremists say India has a sham democracy. This book has so many critical essays on all aspects of our nation. Indian democracy is a work in progress. It’s a miracle.
Indian democracy and pluralism is hard-won. It will continue to be hard-won. We have to be vigilant about extremists. We have to be very attentive to the fault-lines. We have to continuously attend to renewing our institutions. And the processes. In that sense I’m neither an optimist nor a pessimist.
I don’t believe in India story. I want a more peaceable and contented India. It’s a real struggle but what I don’t want is an India of 25 parts and that would be disastrous.
Southern states are a very good example. For example, Kerala. To think of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Sir CP Ramaswamy Iyer wanted an independent Travancore. EV Ramaswamy wanted an independent Tamil nadu. That would have been disastrous for the country. The greatness of India is its diversity. The tragedy of India is the differentiation and inequality. Corruption of the political system.
These 19 thinkers in the book hold a mirror to us while holding a mirror to the rest of the world. India’s experiences can be central to a global debate.
In India After Gandhi I say that anticipation of our super stardom is premature. If the present trend continues one half will be like California and other half will be like sub-Saharan Africa.

Does putting together an anthology any way limit the role of a historian? Is this a less satisfying effort because you are only introducing the works of others to a wider audience?

I like doing anthologies. I did Picador Book of Cricket Writing. I have done three so far. I did an anthology of the writings of M Krishnan ---, Nature's Spokesman : M. Krishnan and Indian wildlife -- the naturalist, who wrote hundreds of wonderful columns on ecology, conservation but never a book. It’s a way of paying tributes. Bringing together diverse things under a connected theme.
I’m like a sutradhar. I’m behind the scenes. It’s complementary to my other work. Makers of Modern India is complementary to the work I have done for India After Gandhi.

How difficult an exercise was it to put together Makers of Modern India? You have dedicated this work to the selfless tribe of librarians…

It was pleasurable and difficult. Difficult because of the exclusions one had to make due to shortage of space. Each of these individuals deserves a whole book. Those who have been left out deserve another anthology.
We are very good on social history. Of peasants and workers. Or writing about political leaders such as Gandhi and Nehru. But not on intellectual history, history of ideas, how people argued and debated about culture, religion, language and democracy, justice, gender. Perhaps in regional languages there are some examples. In Malayalam there are good anthologies in the 19th century on arguments about religion, development, etc.

Makers of Modern India offers an entirely different picture of Indian politicians when compared to the current corrupt lot. Do you expect politicians to read your book?

I don’t think politicians of today are aware of their legacies. I hope politicians like Rahul Gandhi, Mayawati, Mulayam Singh and including Aditya Thackeray read this.

You are the closet we have for a historian as a rock star. Any comments…

No, no.

But in the sense that you made history accessible to a wider audience...

There are several reasons for this. The first thing is that I don’t work in an ideological straitjacket. I’m a liberal. I’m a middle of the road, pro-liberal and open minded. Most Indian historians are ideological. Either they are Marxist or they are Congress or they are Hindutva. And someone is closer to Sonia Gandhi and someone is closer to Prakash Karat. And that is disastrous for a scholar.
The second thing is that, of course, you must write accessibly, devoid of jargons.
And the third thing is that you should be open to influences. I travel everywhere. I go to archives and research, I do that at my study. But I also go and meet people. I’m traveling all the time everywhere. Recently I have been in Vizag, Lucknow, Trivandrum, Trichur and Coimbatore and absorb things. It’s not like you and your books and students. There has to be a willingness to travel, to learn, to listen. And ready to constantly reformulate your positions. Ideological historians have a line and everything has to fit into that line. But I keep changing. It is very important to get out ideological straitjacket and academic constraints.

About Ramachandra Guha

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and columnist based in Bangalore. He has taught at the universities of Yale, Stanford, Oslo and at the Indian Institute of Science. His books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet woods and a social history of Indian cricket, A Corner of A Foreign Field. His India After Gandhi was chosen as a book of the year by The Economist, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The San Francisco Chronicle. Guha’s books and essays have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Indian politicians are ignorant of their legacies: Ramachandra Guha

2010-10-29T20:12:00.003+05:30

By John Cheeran

Contemporary politicians are comprehensively ignorant of the legacies they claim to represent, says Ramachandra Guha, author and historian.
Guha was speaking at the launch of Makers of Modern India, a book edited and introduced by him and published by Penguin Books India.
Makers of Modern India is an anthology of the writings of 19 thinker-activists and includes stalwarts such as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru as well as unjustly forgotten thinkers such as Hamid Dalwai and Tarabai Shinde.
The author said the book was the result of an attempt to find out what contributed to Indian democracy and pluralism in 19th and 20 century. He said Indian democracy owes a lot to proximate traditions rather than emperors such as Asoka and Akbar.
Guha said Makers of Modern India is the public face of the Indian political tradition and writings included in the anthology are highly relevant to the contemporary realities. To illustrate his point Guha quoted BR Ambedkar, the maker of the Indian Constitution, “Bhakti in politics will put you on the road to degradation,” and added that Gandhis and Modis would do well to remember Ambedkar’s words.
Why no politician thinks like Ambedkar any more, asked Guha. Why today’s politicians are lacking the intelligence, literary skill and moral courage to tell the truth like their predecessors did, is a question the book would encourage readers to ask, Guha added. “The book is meant for every thinking Indian, and also for politicians,” Guha said.
Girish Karnad, playwright and author, while launching the Makers of Modern India bemoaned that though Karnataka has been responsive to ideas from all over the world, it has failed to produce many thinker activists equaling the stature of Guha’s 19. He attributed this to the fact that Mysore was under the thumb of British rule and what now constitutes the state was divided into four parts and there was little interaction among these units.
Karnad, however, added that Kannadigas should take solace at the inclusion of Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, a Gandhian and social reformer, whose sphere of work was far removed from the state in the later years.
Karnad said Guha has made the intellectual life of India extremely vibrant and recalled the historian’s confrontations with fellow intellectuals, including Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen and Gayatri Spivak, a post-colonial theorist. Karnad said: “Guha throws up answers and raises new questions in his works and Makers of Modern India, too, does it well.”
Makers of Modern India starts with the first liberal Rammohan Roy and takes readers through Gandhi, Nehru, MS Golwalkar and ends with a single and singular individual – Dalwai, a Marathi speaking Muslim.
Notable exceptions from the list of 19 are Subash Chandra Bose and Vallabbhai Patel. Guha says their writings are ‘flat’.
Marxist thinkers are left out since they have not contributed any original ideas.

Ram Janmasthan is in Ayodhya: A split verdict for national unity

2010-09-30T20:12:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
Three judge Allahabad bench of Lucknow High Court has given a split verdict for national unity. The Ramajanmabhumi-Babri Masjid disputed land is to be divided into three parts --- Sunni Waqf Board, Nirmohi Akhara and Hindus – in what can be interpreted as an out-of-the-box judgment. Judges Sharma, Sudhir Agarwal and SU Khan delivered three separate judgments on the title dispute.
The bench rejected the claims of Sunni Waqf board and Nirmohi Akhara but in a reconciliatory gesture said that the land will be divided in three.
The most significant decision of the bench is that it affirms the place below the central dome of the disputed stricture is the birthplace of Ram. It also said prior to the construction of Babri Masjid in 1528, there was a temple structure at the site but it cannot be definitively said whether it was a Ram temple. The bench relied on the evidence presented by the Archeological Survey of India for this.
What emerges is that the bench has clearly gone beyond the brief given to it when one considers the fact that it pronounced that the place is Ramjanmasthan. It has apparently arrived at this decision considering the majority community’s faith and available evidence such as the ruins of a temple.
It also upheld the installation of Ram idols into the Babri Masjid on December 22, 23, 1949, arguing that there never was a Masjid to begin with at Ramjanmabhumi. The bench said as per the Islamic tenets a mosque will not have legitimacy if it is built over an existing place of worship by destroying it.
The court may have also taken into consideration the observation made by Justice JS Verma in 1994 that in Islam, Muslims can offers prayers at any place and therefore a mosque is not place that cannot be taken over by the state, claiming sanctity.
Of course, in a nutshell, the judgment of Allahabad Bench is a vindication of the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the stance taken by the Bharatiya Janata Party.
It remains to be seen whether Indian Muslims will fight the legal battle and ensure that the long festering wound does not get any salve at all.

The most famous mikes in Delhi now…

2010-09-23T19:49:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
Who the hell are Mike Fennell and Mike Hooper?
Are they the new mikes for Commonwealth imperialism?
Are they George VI?
To order, shove and shout against Indians?
The ruckus created around two aspects -- of security and hygiene – by these two as New Delhi races towards hosting the Commonwealth Games is incredible. It has been spearheaded by two bureaucrats from Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF).
At most places, if you had perceived a problem of hospitality, you would not hold press conferences to castigate the hosts. There are many other ways to fix such issues. Why such niceties were not observed by Mikes?
And who are these gentlemen to issue deadlines to the Indian government? IANS reports that Fennell had given India a 24-hour deadline to clean up the Games Village!
The fact of the matter remains that Australian cricketers are currently in India. People do fly down to Delhi all corners of world despite the threats of Dengue, lax security, and floods. And dust.
If Ponting and his men can play in India, what’s the problem with rest of the Australian athletes? Ponting knows all these years he has been given regal hospitality wherever he has gone in India. May be better than Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, for that matter.
So, again, for whose common cause are Mikes are shouting from rooftop?
And why do we, especially our journalists, fret about national calamity and shame?
It’s time to get out of Commonwealth.

Why is this national breast-beating over Commonwealth Games?

2010-09-22T22:16:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran

Ah! The sound of national breast-beating over the conduct of Commonwealth Games has turned me deaf.
Yes, we have goofed up certain things. Things could have been done better. Rs70,000 crore could have been put to better use.
But what has happened?
There is indignation and outcry from certain quarters. It is quite sad the outcry has been coming from the white supremacist and insular nations such as Australia, New Zealand, Scotland and England. They have been threatening over the last few days to pull out of the Commonwealth Games, citing a long list of reasons which includes inadequate security cover, poor hygiene and living conditions, etc.
Individual athletes have already announced their withdrawals, including Australia’s women’s world discus champion.
Lalit Bhanot, secretary of Amateur Athletic Federation of India and secretary of Commonwealth Games Organising Committee General secretary has a point when he spoke about different standards of cleanliness on Tuesday.
He may be wrong about standards of cleanliness.
But he is spot on when it comes to double standards.
India has a great tradition of hospitality. We also have infuriating approaches to getting things done which can unnerve others.
But the points – security and cleanliness – raised by white nations are merely points of posturing. Please remember, the kind of cleanliness and security these privileged class are quibbling over are 24x7 realities for people like you and me in New Delhi and elsewhere in Indian subcontinent. It also holds true for All the African nations, including South Africa.
Let me say this. This grandstanding of pulling out by a cabal of nations --- Australia, England, Scotland and New Zealand – is only that – grand standing.
Otherwise, it is going to be the end of Commonwealth as we know it.
But the most important guest for India, Pakistan, yes, they haven’t threatened us with a pullout, citing hygiene and security.
If there was any nation in the Commonwealth who should have used the current opportunity to settle political scores, it should have been Pakistan. But they are coming, amply explaining the point made by Bhanot the other day.
Everyone knows that no nation can afford to pull out of Commonwealth Games citing reasons such as security and hygiene. Montreal Olympics witnessed the massacre of Israeli athletes that did not turn Canada a sports pariah. People haven’t stopped flying into New York after 9/11.
But is there an assurance that terror won’t strike again the United States?
Just because of the collapse of a foot over bridge and false ceiling, it is juvenile of news organizations to cry SHAME, SHAME.
Let’s still cling onto to some reserve of self-respect and look at the brighter side. Yes, we will not have a large haul of medals. But let’s thank our political establishment for that. Imagine, following the Chinese model, turning our sports camps into gulags to produce champions to add to national luster.
Journalists are now comparing how China managed to stage Beijing Olympics with India’s amateurish efforts. Tonight I was told that venues for the 2010 Asian Games to be held in Guangzhou from November 12-27 is ready. But, then, in China, journalists will be invited only for the opening ceremony and will be given cues on when and where to clap their hands.
We, instead, have democracy. A third world democracy, that is. India has a different template even when it is going to put the rest of the world in it.
By the way, please understand that the comity of Commonwealth nations is too big than those who are making a hue and cry over the arrangements.
Today I went through the list of nations (as reported by AFP) that are scheduled to take part in the Delhi edition.
It is long. Be calm. The havoc is only on television studios. Cracks are on newspaper columns. Commonwealth Games is happening. Come on India.

KN Panikkar exposes fundamentalists in Kerala

2010-09-17T01:35:00.001+05:30

By KN Panikkar in The HIndu

A lecturer with Newman College in the town of Thodupuzha in Kerala, T.J. Joseph, was brutally attacked on July 4, 2010, allegedly by members of a fundamentalist group. It was an act of retribution: Mr. Joseph had framed a question for an examination for his students in the college, which offended their religious sentiments. The punishment meted out by the aggrieved group was to chop off his palm: it was reminiscent of medieval practices.

The authorities of the college, apparently endorsing the claim of the fundamentalists, suspended the ‘delinquent' teacher and ordered an enquiry. The enquiry committee concluded that he had deliberately subscribed to an activity that promoted feelings of enmity between different communities/ religions.

The controversial question paper by itself had not lead to any manifest enmity between different religious communities, as the enquiry report had suspected. But the fundamentalists created a law and order situation by resorting to rioting.

Consequently, the lecturer was dismissed from service, and thus debarred from “future employment in any of the institutions maintained by or affiliated to the university.”

Mr. Joseph had had no record of communal bias or instigation during his career in the college. He is reported to have been a conscientious teacher with a rapport with students and cordial relations with colleagues: this is evident from the public testimony of students. To them his dismissal was thoroughly unexpected, and they struck work demanding his reinstatement. But the college authorities did not relent. They took the position that they would reconsider their action only if the Muslim community made an appeal to reinstate him, or the court issued an order to that effect. A highly irrational act was thus sought to be imbued with legal respectability and given a communal character.

This incident is symptomatic of the creeping influence of fundamentalism that has led to violence in the country at large and certain recent outbursts in Kerala. What has happened to Mr. Joseph is also indicative of the vulnerability of academic space and the authoritarian tendencies of certain managements of educational institutions in the State. Mr. Joseph almost lost a limb (it has since been reattached through a difficult surgical procedure) to the brutality of religious fundamentalism, and he has now been deprived of his job by an insensitive and inhumane college management. While the fundamentalists resorted to the act in order to terrorise the ‘deviants' and ensure that their religious fiats are carried out by all, the college management saw it as an opportunity to enforce discipline and to nip in the bud the influence of critical and rational thinking. Both actions are highly deplorable. Unfortunately, these have not led to a sufficiently strong reaction from the public.

It appears that there is ambiguity in the public mind about Mr. Joseph's own role. The reason is that the charge against him involves meddling with religious sentiments. Although new religions and sects emerge out of non-conformism and as a critique of the present, the established religions mostly see their interest to be linked with the status quo. That was perhaps why the Catholic Church was not moved by appeals to their humanitarian and philanthropic credentials. The Church has now issued a pastoral letter supporting and justifying the action of the college management. It is surprising that in a State that is surcharged by protests and a variety of public interest litigation processes, except for teachers' and students' organisations the liberal intelligentsia has not come forward in defence of Mr. Joseph.

The ‘crime' he committed was to frame a question by reproducing a conversation between God and ‘Muhammad' from a text written by film-maker P.T. Kunhi Mohammed, who is a believer. The ‘mistake' he made was to change the name of the character of a lunatic in the original, to ‘Muhammad.' The fundamentalist group was enraged by the use of the name of the Prophet.

Why Mr. Joseph changed the name is unknown. He is reported to have stated that he was not influenced by any religious reason but used a shorter version of Mr. Kunhi Mohammed's work. ‘Muhammad' is a popular name among Muslims, and there is nothing in the text of the question paper to suggest that it was the Prophet who was implied. Nor did it contain any critique of any religion — including Islam, Christianity and Hinduism.

But to a fundamentalist group that resorts to terror tactics as an instrument of coercion, it provided an opportunity to further its cause. Among Hindus, Rama and Krishna are popular names and are worshipped as incarnations of god. Imagine a situation in which a reference to these names, in literature or academic texts or in a question paper, is considered blasphemous! If this happens, soon writers will find it difficult to give a name to their characters.

That fundamentalists indulge in such irrational behaviour is not surprising. They still live in medieval times, and with hardly any respect for human values. But that cannot be expected from those who have taken the responsibility of imparting education to people. The authorities of Newman College where Mr. Joseph has taught for 25 years quickly took the questionable step of first suspending and then dismissing him — all in the name of communal harmony and secularism.

Unfortunately, they did not realise that the greatest threat to secularism and communal harmony is religious fundamentalism. That is why the management's offer to withdraw the dismissal orders if the Muslim community made an appeal for such a withdrawal, becomes self-contradictory. The management seems to have overlooked the fact that by doing so it was reinforcing the communal, and not secular, consciousness. What was done would only help legitimise the fundamentalist forces and not strengthen secularism, as the college authorities claim. In fact, they should have stood by Mr. Joseph and defended his academic freedom as a teacher. Instead, they compromised with fundamentalism and extended to it a helping hand — also sullying the Christian character of the institution.

It is high time that the managements of public-funded private institutions are brought under a democratic structure, so that healthy norms prevail in these institutions and higher education becomes accessible to larger sections of the population, including the poor. It is to be hoped that either through legal intervention or democratic struggles Mr. Joseph would be reinstated, or adequately compensated.

But the brutality of the fundamentalists on the one hand, and the irresponsibility of educational entrepreneurs on the other, have already vitiated the academic atmosphere. In order to overcome this situation, new steps are called for, both from the part of the government and civil society.

It also raises the larger, even if contentious, issue of the management of education in Kerala. Since 1984, the government, through a system of financial aid, meets the entire expenses towards payment of salary and maintenance of private colleges. The share of the management is meagre. What the managements typically do, however, is to milk these institutions through various means. It is common knowledge that most of these colleges indulge in corrupt practices, both in the matter of appointment of teachers and grant of admission to students. Since there is practically no control exercised by the government or the universities over aided institutions, many managements treat colleges as a source of income. Some of them also fatten their purses by conducting self- financing courses, utilising facilities created by public funds. The Central government has introduced in Parliament a Bill to prevent the prevalent unfair practices in the field of education. How far it will succeed in doing so is anybody's guess.

Religious fundamentalists are on the rise among Muslims and Hindus. Permitting them to influence the practices of education has long-term implications. The most dangerous possibility is the state of social and political consciousness such compromises would produce. Compromising with religious fundamentalism, as the authorities of Newman College have done, is likely to lead the country to Talibanism.

Why values should matter…

2010-09-14T19:15:00.000+05:30

The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes..
“China and India have been catching up to America not only via cheap labor and currencies. They are catching us because they now have free markets like we do, education like we do, access to capital and technology like we do, but, most importantly, values like our Greatest Generation had. That is, a willingness to postpone gratification, invest for the future, work harder than the next guy and hold their kids to the highest expectations.
In a flat world where everyone has access to everything, values matter more than ever. Right now the Hindus and Confucians have more Protestant ethics than we do, and as long as that is the case we’ll be No. 11!

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li: A Review

2010-09-10T01:14:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
People are the most dangerous animals in the world, says teacher Gu while recalling how his only daughter Shan was betrayed as a counter revolutionary by her boyfriend in the Chinese immigrant author Yiyun Li’s debut novel The Vagrants.
Living in a totalitarian state Gu cannot be blamed for losing faith in himself and those around him. Betrayals often come from the most intimate and beloved people in one’s life as the teacher realises. Gu, at the end of his tether, is still left guessing whether his first wife used him as an anticipatory bail if the revolution did not take off.
Between two executions Li tries to portray a picture of China coming to terms with the immediate aftermath of the end of Cultural Revolution in 1978.
The Vagrants, which won the Guardian’s First Book Award, promises a lot but fails to deliver in the end. The lack of a central character to build her story saps the energy from Li’s narrative.
You expect a certain kind of stories from a writer who has left behind a totalitarian state. It’s almost a habit now. In that context, much of what the US-based Li, 38, writes fits in with readers’ idea of a stifling atmosphere.
In Li’s China, God is Communist party. In Red Star school, young Tong is reminded of how much the Party cares for its children. “Everybody’s equally loved by the party, but when someone makes a mistake, just as when a child makes a mistake, the party will not let a single wrongdoer slip by.”
Not much of that situation has been changed, if you recall the kind of elaborate arrangements the Party made to prevent the Chinese converging on Tiananmen Square on the 20th anniversary of the suppression of the student protest last year. Till now, there has been no recrudescence of Tiananmen Square.
The Vagrants starts on a somber note. Li evocatively portrays the emotional trauma teacher Gu and his wife faces, preparing for the day of public denunciation and execution of their only daughter, Shan, condemned to death after being branded as a counter-revolutionary by the Party.
It is teacher Gu who shines through this bleak novel, despite his doubts and disappointments, putting counter revolutionaries such as Shan and Kai into the shade. Despite being a teacher revered by villagers, Gu, however, could not determine his daughter’s fortunes.
Shan, revolutionary-turned-counter-revolutionary, we watch only from a distance and get to know through the reminiscences of her parents.
The angst, in the aftermath of Shan’s execution, comes home to roost with Kai, the voice of the revolution. The big change and support that Kai and Jialin expected from Beijing never arrive and the protest fizzles out with another bullet.
In the end you agree with teacher Gu. The only way to live on, he had known most of his adulthood, was to focus on the small patch of life in front of one’s eyes.

Title: The Vagrants
Author: Yiyun Li
Publisher: Fourth Estate
Price: 7.99 pounds
Pages: 338

No-ball troika from Pakistan: Presumed Innocent?

2010-09-02T21:43:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
This is the month of Ramadan. Three Pakistani cricketers ---captain Salman Butt, fast bowlers Mohammad Asif and Mohammad Aamir -- on Thursday said they were innocent and the rest of the world, I mean, The News of The World is torturing them. May be, they are not lying.
Pakistan is a colourful nation and often that colour is blood red. I remember that during the last cricket World Cup in 2007, held in the West Indies, Pakistan’s coach Bob Woolmer was found murdered. The team manager, then faced with a moral crisis, said while facing the global media that he asked his players to swear on Koran, by placing their hands on the book, that they had no role to play in the most foul murder. There was no incriminating video footage in the West Indies.
Here in London, nailed by the video footage, no such exercises are coming forth. Now the tagline is Presumed Innocent. Till yesterday Butt, Aamir and Asif were seen smiling but now they have said they are not in a mental frame to play cricket.
They are not suspended by the Pakistan Cricket Board. They are not dropped. They have simply walked away from the centre.
To argue that a brilliant bowler such as Aamer was not the cause but the consequence of circumstances and should not be banned for life from the game, as former England captain Mike Atherton has argued, is nothing but sophistry.
When you stray from the line, batsmen punish you. When you err, you get punished. Till now cricketers accused of colluding with bookies could wriggle out since there was no evidence of having taken money for falling in line with the bookies.
Here, for the first time, players are caught on camera along with the bookie, of accepting money. But Imran Khan, that opportunist par excellence, now wants the brilliance of young Aamir to be protected. Match-fixing and spot-fixing, too, need martyrs, Imran. Aamir, if he is found to be guilty, deserves no place on a cricket field in any form of game. Ditto for Butt and Asif.
Cricket’s problems stem from the fact that its administrators lack the will to take impartial and tough decisions. They need to serve the game, not the petty power and personal equations with in the respective national boards.
The spirit of forgiving should take a back seat this Ramadan.

Freedom of choice comes with an emotional tax: Interview with Sheena Iyengar

2010-09-01T19:40:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
No one asks better questions, or comes up with more intriguing answers, that’s how Malcolm Gladwell describes Sheena Iyengar, 40, a professor at the Columbia Business School, who has written the highly acclaimed book The Art of Choosing.
As a daughter of Indian immigrants, Iyengar had to make tough choices while growing up in United States.
When Iyengar was three years old, she was diagnosed with a rare form of retinitis pigmentos, an inherited disease of retinal degeneration. By 6th grade, Iyengar had lost the ability to read, and by 11th grade, she had lost her sight entirely and could only perceive light. When she was 13, her father died of a heart attack.
Despite such trying circumstances, Iyengar says she has chosen the big things in her life. During a visit to Bangalore, she speaks about the emotional tax that each one of us has to pay for the freedom of choice.

Excerpts from an interview:

Has this book far exceeded your expectations?

I didn’t really know what expectations to have. Yes, exceeded. It changed my life, actually. It really depends on your definition of exceed and expectations. Everything that has happened since the book has come out is positive. I’m generally a positive person.

Has life chosen you or you have chosen life?

I would say that the big things in life, to some extent, I have chosen. So much of our life is determined by what happens to us. The only choice we have is how we react.

Have you ever felt that your choices have been limited by your circumstances?

I think that’s true for everyone that our choices are based on our circumstances. When I applied for my PhD programme, I actually was thinking of becoming a clinical psychologist. And I went to my advisor when I was an undergrad. My professor wanted a list of schools I was applying to so that he would write a letter of recommendation. I gave him the list and he said he cannot write this letter until I put Stanford University on the list. Stanford didn’t have a clinical programme but since my professor insisted I put Stanford on the list. I wanted to go to Yale. I was told my some other professors that I have made it to Yale and they congratulated me. But I didn’t get the offer and kept waiting. And when I went to see my professor, the one who insisted on me adding Stanford to the list, said ‘Yale called me but I told them you don’t belong there.’ You need to go to Stanford, he told me. Then Stanford called and I went. That effectively changed my life.

Had you been living in India, would you have written this book?

Oh. I don’t know how to answer that question. Who knows what I would have been had I grown up in India. I don’t think I’m capable of figuring that out.

Do you believe in free will? In India, many believe that everything in life is pre-ordained. So do choices matter?

I do think choices matter. I don’t think you have free will about everything. I think from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, or the moment you born till the moment you die, you are constantly being manipulated by circumstances, your family, friends, your government, no matter what it is, they are manipulating you, influencing you.

To go to the other side, and say you have no free will is also incorrect. If you consciously decide that something is important then you have the ability to veto the negative influence. I can say that, to a certain degree, I can exercise some degree of free will. I have the power to exercise my free will and say no or yes or do something different in certain situations.

Can beggars be choosers?

Yes. Why not? They make choices. They may have fewer choices. Certainly beggars have more constraints but everybody has the ability to make choices in the midst of constraints.

What’s more important -- having multiple choices or having information on whatever choices you have?

It is much more important to be able to understand how your choices differ. I could it put another way. The value of choice depends on your ability to perceive differences between the options.

Do you think Indians are ‘super thinkers’ when confronted with multiple choices in daily life?

No. I wouldn’t call them super thinkers. I do think that they have certain decision making methods. Indian women are more likely to, when picking out a sari, jewellery, do it in a group and get multiple opinions and reach a consensus.
That is probably how they better cope with the rise in a range of options. It seems consensus is the driving criteria for determining which is the choice you make.

For a society such as India what’s true—the more is less or the less is more?

I think if there is one thing the Indians can benefit from, in terms of thinking about choice, is how to create choice.
There is a lot more emphasis here on difficulties and limitations in Indian society. And sometimes, I think, that thwarts the ability to be creative. The less can be more if you are able to use those constraints to generate new and useful options.

Do you have any tips for Sophie as in Sophie’s Choice.

Aaaah. That’s what so terrible about that choice, right? Can you advise her anything? If you tell her not to choose the outcome is terrible. If you tell her to choose, the outcome is terrible.

What would you tell her?

I don’t think you can tell anybody what to do in that case.

Is choice a science or art?

It ultimately is an art. Science can help you become more skillful but in the end your ability to choose depends on your ability to balance the pros and cons, the possibilities and the limitations, the uncertainties, the contradictions. And so much of what makes the choice work out in the end is what you do with the choice you make.

Do you think your book will help one make better choices?

I hope so. That, certainly, is the intention behind the book.

What’s next for you?

It will take a few years for me to write another book. I may write about globalisation, something I teach about and research about. Or I might write about the psychology of money.

You write that freedom of choice comes with an emotional tax. Who pays it more, man or woman?

It does. In different ways in different domains. I don’t think one pays more tax than the other.

Is there anything else I should have asked you, which I haven’t?

No, I think that’s fine.

When players are fixers

2010-08-30T17:42:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
So what’s new? Match-fixing in cricket is old hat especially after Hansie Cronje was fixed by Delhi Police and all of us know cricketers, irrespective of nationalities and racial background, are willing to take the bait if you can up the stakes.
Yes, it’s a total disaster for Pakistan cricket and Pakistan the nation state. The News of The World expose has done more damage to Pakistan than the recent floods and possibly what an Indian nuclear attack could have done. It would take a long, long time for the credibility of Pakistani cricketers to be restored.
India, too, had dealt with the monster of match-fixing and who can tell how clean Mahendra Singh Dhoni and his band of men are? But, then, unless exposed and established otherwise we should believe in their integrity.
With video footage clearly showing some of the Pakistan players currently touring England accepting cash from a bookie, things are looking bleak for Salman Butt and guys.
Arguments that spot fixing is a bit of harmless fun and the result of the match is not influenced or determined by such transgressions will not hold much water since it’s question of integrity of the players involved. You can either be bought or cannot.
Will this recent spate of allegations drive fans away from cricket? Today, cricket is many things for many people. More than a sport, it’s a commercial circus and all those involved, television channels, sponsors, players, International Cricket Council, national cricket boards will do their level best to convince us that what’s being offered is genuine, unadulterated stuff.
And you watch at your own peril.
Long live cricket.

Absolute Khushwant By Khushwant Singh: A Review

2010-08-25T22:46:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
These days readers are more familiar with Chetan Bhagat than Kushwant Singh. It’s a pity. Singh, at a venerable 95, can no longer shock or prick Indian society’s egos. We, of course, have come a long way since the sardar wrote that his pen has no condom.
Very few would have read Singh’s Train to Pakistan that tried to capture the emotional vivisection of partition, published in 1956. Singh still retains the candour that endeared him to readers of his newspaper columns in the past and his fresh take on various topics, Absolute Khushwant, is a delightful read thanks to his brutal honesty.
Singh, a former editor of Hindustan Times and The Illustrated Weekly of India, never cared for political correctness and has no qualms to recall that by turning bullshitting into an art form he changed Indian journalism irrevocably. As an editor he never hesitated to titillate, if there was an occasion for it.
Singh still sings the praise of Sanjay Gandhi, despite Emergency and all that. He not only finds Sanjay dynamic but confesses that it was the man in a hurry who got him the editor’s job at The Hindustan Times. Not many editors would have been honest enough to say this when the dead cannot come back to scratch your back.
Many associate Singh’s prolific writings with ribaldry but the novelist, historian, lawyer and editor has many shades that quarrel against easy classifications.
Singh takes pride in continuing his war against fundoos despite advancing age. BJP, he says, has poisoned the country with its right wing agenda.
At the height of Emergency, Singh supported Sanjay and Indira Gandhi unabashedly. Today, Singh says, India is in safe hands—in the hands of Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. Well, not much has changed in his world.

The curious case of Vishwanathan Anand’s Indian passport

2010-08-24T17:59:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
Who is an Indian?
If Vishwanathan Anand, who has been living in Spain for many years in order to pursue his passion, chess in this case, ceases to be an Indian merely because of the number of days he has spent in India in recent times, it is an incredibly ludicrous moment thanks to a babu in New Delhi.
Anand, of course, holds a valid Indian passport. Despite that it now has emerged that the human resource department in New Delhi raised doubts about Anand’s citizenship status when Hyderabad University decided to honour him with a doctorate.
Unlike most of us resident Indians, Anand has brought India glory. He has been the most unassuming of champions that India has produced and loves his Tamil, idli and sambhar in that order.
Anand is the finest brand ambassador India could ever attain. It’s true that he had to shift his base to Spain. He finds it more convenient to compete and keep abreast of the game from there. May be tax regime there is a bit more considerate. But he is not living in Pakistan. He has married a Chennai girl. His parents live in Chennai. His friends are in India. His heart is in India. Whenever he has won a world title – right from when he won the world junior chess title in 1987—the country has made him its own.
Let’s not forget that the desperation with which we try to appropriate individual who excel on global stage, especially science. Remember Venkataraman Ramakrishnan? When he won the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2009, we were quick to find reference points to India so that we could bask in reflected glory. And he had utter contempt for all of us when he blurted out that congratulatory emails from India only go to waste his time and energy.
Unlike many such worthies, Anand has been modest to a fault and never forgot the fact that in outlook and approach he remains an Indian, though he does not require the state’s patronage to ply his trade.
If Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, LK Advani and I are Indians, Anand, too, is an Indian, though king on the chessboard does not have any nationality.

Serious Men By Manu Joseph: A Review

2010-08-23T20:47:00.003+05:30

By John Cheeran
Every English language journalist in India has a novel project. Manu Joseph has completed it in a remarkable manner and Serious Men is the result.
It’s smart novel, one that you dream of producing at a writers’ workshop. It’s about a daring con job that a Dalit pulls off on scientific society with stealth and a large dose of insouciance.
A lot of thought has gone into the making of Serious Men.
Just as Ayyan Mani had a project to turn his son Adi into a genius, at least for a short span of time, making use of paid news and other tricks, Joseph too had his grand design of vowing readers. Please note that both Mani and Joseph chuckle at the end of the story.
Joseph does not need a certificate from me on how well he writes. Of course, he writes well.
Familiarity with journalism has helped Joseph hone his writing skills and it is a pleasure to read his measured, clear sentences and sardonic wit.
But one cannot ignore the artifice and intellectual pretension that inform and, in the process, harm Serious Men. In the end it is a deflating experience to realize that Joseph’s Serious Men derives its strength from Mani’s stealth and voice recorder as well as the ire of a spurned woman to sustain the narrative and engineer the denouement.
In a recent column in Open magazine Joseph has explained how he seized upon the idea for his novel project while reacting to a newspaper story on a childhood prodigy. His skepticism shows through the novel and results in smart aleck moments such as when Arvind Acharya notes how human beings can live without water, citing Tamilians as living proof. Well, I loved Acharya’s speech where he observes that how every mediocre fellow rails about mediocrity without realizing his own shortcomings. Such wry observations sit well in a column but a great novel requires insights and inspirational writing.
Joseph, however, has brilliantly captured the social tension in the post-Mandal India, and racial and class divisions that alarm and frighten the Brahmins. The big stories in a liberalized India are the rise of Dalits and Naxals. Again there can be opinions on whether the journalist has triumphed over the novelist or vice versa.
When markets crashed in India in 1998, Joseph had written a piece in Times of India that began with the lines “every time a friend of mine succeeds a little part of me dies.”
It’s a line made famous by Gore Vidal and though Jospeh chose not to acknowledge the American, the success that Serious Men has attracted will leave you no choice but to say it aloud.

Delhi Calm By Vishwajyoti Ghosh: A Review

2010-08-23T20:42:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
Delhi Calm is a graphic novel with a difference. It tackles contemporary Indian history about which our understanding, still, is nebulous. As a recent newspaper report suggests, 35 years later, no one in the Indian establishment knows where the documents that record the correspondence between then President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed and the government are.
Vishwajyoti Ghosh deserves praise for choosing the dark days of Emergency (1975 June 25-1977 January 18) for his debut graphic novel.
Ghosh, however, could not weave a gripping tale out of the exciting and exasperating times when there was change, and Total Revolution, as coined by that wooly idealist Jayaprakash Narayan, were in the air.
What instead Delhi Calm provides is political commentary in patches. It’s a long and laborious affair and at the end of it, the reader is not left with any single graphic image that captures the bathos of those extra-ordinary times.
It is important to recall in this context the cartoon by the late Abu Abraham which depicted President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed supine in his bathtub and signing yet another constitutional amendment as desired by prime minister Indira Gandhi and asking a flunkey if there are any more ordinances he has to sign. It calls for an astute understanding of the political theatre, and may be in good time Ghosh would grow to acquire it.
Having said that one must admit Ghosh has succeeded in conveying a fair share of the complexity that dogged JP’s call for Total Revolution.
Not only the Prophet even his movement was undergoing dialysis with a motley crew almost hijacking it. By slipping Jogi, the right winger, into Naya Savera Band constituted by Vibuti Prasad, Parvez Alam and Masterji in the name of ‘inclusion’, Ghosh shows how cracks began to develop in the identity of the righteous movement. Masks were worn by not just Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay but those who were ranged against them too.
Ghosh has gone on record that he did not intend Delhi Calm as a dummy’s guide to Emergency. That’s fine. One can look elsewhere for that. Delhi Calm’s fatal flaw lies in the fact that its author lacks a story, a bigger picture to share with readers. Even after all these years.

Title: Delhi Calm
Author: Vishwajyoti Ghosh
Publisher: HarperCollins
Pages: 246
Price: Rs499

Delhi On The Road by Supriya Sahai: A Review

2010-08-23T20:41:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran

Flipping through these black and white sketches by Supriya Sahai you suddenly realise that Delhi, essentially, is a city of tombs. Ghosts of emperors walk its streets and Sahai’s attention for detail produces stunning visuals, even for someone who has spent the best part of his youth in the city.
Humayun, the only Mughal emperor to have been buried in Delhi, and a slew of others have their private spaces to rest in peace. She, however, has no time for Rajghat.
Sahai’s Delhi is steeped in history. Most of the sketches make you aware of the deep scars in the cityscape and of rulers and empires that quietly slumped out of our sights.
Delhi On The Road is a collection of richly evocative sketches that offers insights to the historic city. You also realise that in spite of the appellation of new to the city, there is a distinct lack of modern monuments in New Delhi. May be the Metro and flyovers along with suffocating and chaotic traffic should be enough for New Delhi. But, then, again these are sketches from a curiosity angle to satisfy the needs of travellers. Sahai, it seems, has no pretensions of laying bare the soul of the city through her drawings.
Title: Delhi On The Road
Author: Supriya Sahai
Publisher: Collins
Pages:156
Price: Rs 299

Randiv’s no-ball: All is fair in love and cricket

2010-08-18T23:29:00.003+05:30

By John Cheeran
Virender Sehwag missed his century. Is that such a big deal? India played Sri Lanka in a inconsequential triangular one-day match in Dambulla on Monday and won comfortably. It should have ended there. But when you are looking for a story, such circumstances are not missed easily. With Sehwag unbeaten on 99, India only needed a single to overcome the Lankan total of 170.
So in a losing situation Sri Lankan bowler (off-spinner) Suraj Randiv did the smartest thing to do – sent down a no-ball by overstepping the bowler’s crease to deny Sehwag his 13th ODI century.
No rules were broken.
I don’t think Randiv or Sri Lankan captain Kumar Sangakkara or Tillakaratne Dilshan besmirched the spirit of the game by that smart piece of strategy.
Yes, they were not magnanimous to allow Sehwag complete a statistical milestone. Cricket, after all, is a sport and sport tends to be combative and competitive.
I’m baffled at the attempt of some commentators to draw parallel with Australian Trevor Chappell’s underarm ball to New Zealand striker Brian McKechnie in the final of Benson and Hedges Cup in 1981. That was well within the rule book but not in the spirit of the game.
In Sri Lanka, the other day, had Sehwag showed some more urgency the century would have been his. There was no attempt to subvert the spirit of the game; and India won. Had the non-striker been an enterprising guy, there would not have been enough opportunity for Sehwag to complete his milestone. So these are mere storm in tea cups.
The fact that Sri Lankan cricket board took the matter seriously and conducted an internal inquiry is a welcome step indeed. Now that Randiv has been suspended for one-match and Dilshan docked his match-fee, Sri Lankan board can retain its veneer of moral superiority.
But let’s not forget that all is fair in love and cricket.

Tiger Hills by Sarita Mandanna: A Review

2010-08-02T19:35:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran

“No matter how far I tried to go from you. No matter how I have tried to forget, or how much I deny it, I carry you within me like a hook in a fish. Like a bullet, Devi, a bullet that has worked its way permanently into my flesh.”

Push a pin anywhere on earth, it may hit upon letters of love.
In Tiger Hills, Sarita Mandanna tells an epic love story set in Coorg. It’s her debut novel but you can immediately sense the masterly control she wields on the narrative. In itself, a love triangle is not the ideal subject to make a gripping read. We have had enough of love.
To the credit of Mandanna, it must be said that she keeps the reader engaged almost till the end and the restraint with which she handles the all-consuming love of Devi is laudable.
The obvious fault line is the epilogue that reveals the desperation of Mandanna, clueless on how and where to apply the brakes to the wheels of fiction.
Mandanna, a private equity professional with a PGDM from the Indian Institute of Management and MBA from Wharton Business School, has stuck to a terrain that she is familiar with in Tiger Hills. That’s her strength. Being a Coorgi has helped Mandanna to easily evoke the mysterious charm of hills in the pages of Tiger Hills.
With butter yellow laburnums twisting in the breeze, Mandanna’s heroine Devi Nachimanda is determined to set right the one calamitous event in her life, her marriage to Devanna. Later Devi realises that one has to fight for happiness and for one’s dues. May be we, too, should agree with her.
It’s not Kambeymadas – Devanna, her meek but intelligent childhood friend with gold in his brain, and tiger killer Machaiah – who play crucial roles in Devi’s life. It’s Devi who woos Machu the hero, forcing him to break his vow. It’s Devi who pushes her husband Devanna and later Machu’s wife into suicides. Alas, as in love, Devanna fails in ending his life too.
Devi is the child of destiny. The flock of herons that sent her avvaiah Muthavva the message, reappears in Devi’s life quite often.
Devi’s grit is remarkable when confronted with love—her love for Machu and Devanna’s love for her. Even when Machu finally retreats from their illicit rendezvous and gets married, Devi is unwavering in her devotion and attention to the one who was meant for.
She, in fact, turns the death of Machu, far away in the battlefield of Afghan mountains, to further her own agenda. She fills the absence of Machu by bringing home Machu’s son Appu and bringing up the kid as her own.
It’s Devi’s way of wreaking revenge on tayi and appaiah who left her with little choice other than marrying Devanna when the latter fled the medical college in Bangalore and sought refuge in the body of his beloved. Addled by ragging and the death of his pet squirrel Nancy, Devanna had lost control of himself. He wanted love, an anchor in his life. On his return, he could not resist and forced himself upon Devi and in the process set in motion betrayals that went on to devastate the lives of his and Machaiah’s sons.
At the end one realises that Tiger Hills is more about suffering than love. The suffering of missionary Hermann Gundert, who pinned all his hopes on Mission Devanna but found to his bitterness that all the signs were misplaced, the suffering of husband (Coorg) Devanna who lives on regardless the insults of his Devi, the suffering of Nanjappa, a son whom his mother calls a curse, and the suffering of Nancy the squirrel. And most of all, the suffering of Devi herself, who finally has to accept fate as it is, despite all her fighting spirit.

Excerpts:
It had been the nape of her neck. The first, fatal hook. The smooth skinned grace of it, all but obscured by the plait that swung to her hips. She had thrust past him at the Kaveri tank, the very picture of determination and his spurt of irritation was swiftly replaced by amusement. And then, as she had wedged herself before him, he had found himself unable to tear his eyes away. Following every dip of light and shadow, the interplay of muscle beneath the translucent skin, as he craned her neck this way and that. He had shut his eyes for only a brief moment in prayer; when they opened, she was tilting slowly towards the water. The compactness of her waist, fitting neatly into the span of his hands.

Title: Tiger Hills
Author: Sarita Mandanna
Publisher: Penguin Viking
Pages: 452
Price: 599

Adoor Gopalakrishnan: A Life In Cinema: A Review

2010-07-28T17:04:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
There is cinema in India outside of Bollywood and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, a classicist in the mould of Satyajit Ray, has made significant contributions to sustain such alternative ways of light and shade. Adoor, an auteur celebrated internationally, but in India and, especially in his native Kerala, is regarded as an aloof man and, as happens mostly, is branded arrogant.
Film critic Gautaman Bhaskaran’s authorised biography of the director, Adoor Gopalakrishnan: A Life In Cinema, disappointingly does not offer enough insights and inputs that will help one understand the auteur better.
Adoor who has made films such as Swayamvaram, Kodiyettam, Elipathayam, Mukhamukham and Vidheyan deserves a biography that should read more than the reviews of his eleven features he has made in a long career.
Adoor is not an easy man or a film-maker to understand. As Shyam Benegal reminds us Adoor’s movies are meditations on the human condition. Bhaskaran, who has closely watched Adoor’s career from the vantage point of a journalist, has a written biography largely based on conversations that he had with the filmmaker. It’s challenge for any biographer to make Adoor confess about his life and movies. Bhaskaran, however, is unpretentious and writes lucidly and has succeeded to a great extent to give the reader an overall view about Adoor’s world. Adoor says: “Cinema is actually one’s experience. One’s vision of life. The filmmaker’s. That is his cinema.”
Adoor’s first movie (Swayamvaram) was released in 1972. Except for Nalu Pennungal and Oru Pennum Randaanum, the interval between his movies has been an excruciating four years, most of the times. The interval only reflects the time and thought that Adoor puts into his movies. He is a careful filmmaker. There is not a single frame in his oeuvre that is inessential. And he is a careful and cagey talker too which rules out a brutal self-portrait.
Adoor is not a stranger to controversies and, in Kerala, fellow filmmakers in art film circuit has had many bones to pick with him. It’s quite disappointing that Bhaskaran could not persuade Adoor to explain why he did not work with Kodiyettam Gopi after the successful 1977 effort (Kodiyettam) that gave the actor the national award. The lack of critical observations on the filmmaker from his contemporaries will, of course, invite the charge of the biography being a hagiography. Had Bhaskaran talked to Adoor’s heroes (Mammooty, Madhu, MR Gopakumar) and heroines (Sobhana, Mini Nair) the portrait would have been fuller.
And if you want to understand Adoor as a friend, lover, husband and father, you will have to wait longer.

Title: Adoor Gopalakrishnan: A Life In Cinema
Author: Gautaman Bhaskaran
Publisher: Penguin Viking

Why do they want to Islamise Kerala?

2010-07-26T21:38:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
Comrade VS Achuthanandan has finally blurted out the truth. He said in New Delhi the other day that the Muslim fundamentalist organization Popular Front of India has plans to convert Kerala into a Muslim-majority state in 20 years and is using money and love to achieve its aim.
Now, obviously, truth has few takers.
And Muslims in Kerala are mighty upset at the statement of VS Achuthanandan.
But why should they?
Shouldn’t they be happy at the thought that in the next 20 years Kerala will truly become Allah’s Own Country with rest of the Kerala converting into Islam?
Crescent will replace hammer and sickle. Paradise, Period.
Can any devout, God-fearing Muslim be unhappy about such a scenario?
Think of it, Kerala will be a Saudi Arabia without desert! The variety of mind-boggling burqas that one can lech at gives me goose bumps.
E Ahmed, minister of state for railways in Union cabinet and a Muslim League MP, says Achuthandan’s statement is meant to create communal divide in the state. In an edit-page article written for Mathrubhumi, Muslim League leader P Kunhalikutty has called Achuthanandan a communalist.
Muslim leaders, especially that of Indian Union Muslim League (think of it, can there be any more fundamentalist party name in Indian democracy than the IUML?), are saying that as the chief minister of the state VS should not have said what he said.
What has VS said?
He has only shared the information the Kerala Police have ferreted out especially after the Taliban attack on Professor TJ Joseph. Literature seized during raids at the offices and homes of Popular Front members clearly show the Islamisation agenda at work in the state. Muslim youth are encouraged to take the path of Love Jihad to marry girls from other religions and produce as many kids as possible.
The Times of India report quotes VS: “The outfit (Popular Front) was attempting to do this by influencing youth of other religion and converting them by giving money, marrying them to Muslim women and thus producing kids of the community.”
A chief minister is duty bound to speak out against such a divisive agenda.
Kerala’s Muslim community should introspect what is happening within its fold. Popular Front is not a right wing Hindu organization. All its members swear by Koran. They have turned some of the mosques in the state, if not all, into magazines. When police seize weapons from masjids and madrasas, shouldn’t the Muslim community be alarmed?
And this has been happening for the last many years.
LeT South India commander and Bangalore blasts accused Tadiyantavide Nazeer had told his interrogators that the plan was to Islamize the state by 2050. Also in August 2009, the Kerala High Court had asked the police to investigate charges that there was a racket operating in the state which aimed at luring youth to Islam by feigning love.
From North Kerala, Muslim youth went to Kashmir to be part of the Jihad against the government of India. IUML workers, a few years ago, hoisted the Muslim League flag at the Kozhikode international airport. These are facts, not cooked-up charges.
Every time a Muslim youth get caught in terrorism related charges, the propaganda is that the state is on a witch hunt against the community. If there were sensible leaders within the community, they would have urged its members not to pursue the narrow, divisive and destructive agenda in the name of Koran and Islam.
In Kerala, Muslims are a powerful community. It has access to everything that that state provides as much as other communities in the state. So what’s the Muslim community’s grouse? Why do they want to chop off kafir hands? Why are they involved in havala deals? Why do they want to Talibanise Kerala?
It is an utterly lame response to say that Popular Front is a fringe group and one should ignore them. In fact, it is not. Is Jamat Islami a fringe group? No. In fact, even among Muslims, there is utter confusion about which is the lunatic fringe, and which is not.
Is Abdul Nasar Madani’s People’s Democratic Party a fringe group? Is he a fundamentalist? There have to be answers for such questions.
Every time investigations expose terrorist and other nefarious links among Muslim members in the state, the community leadership shies away from confronting the truth. It’s time it engaged with reality.
If anyone harbours fantasies of altering Kerala’s cultural and demographic map, if not today, there will be a backlash tomorrow. And it would be worse than Gujarat. I hope better sense will prevail among those who swear by the fantasies of Shariath.

Popular Front wants Islamic Kerala: VS (The Times of India Report)

2010-07-26T21:36:00.002+05:30

Editor's note: The Sunday Times of India carried this report in all its editions across India on July 25, 2010

TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Thiruvananthapuram: Kerala chief minister VS Achutanandan dropped a bombshell on Saturday alleging that the Popular Front of India had plans to convert the state into a Muslim-majority one in 20 years and was using money and love to achieve its aim.
Speaking to reporters in New Delhi, VS slammed the PFI, which is alleged to have masterminded the attack on Kerala college lecturer T J Joseph accused of hurting Muslim sentiments.
The PFI, VS stated, was trying to multiply Muslim numbers in the state and believed that Kerala would be a Muslim-majority state after 20 years. “The outfit was attempting to do this by influencing youth of other religion and converting them by giving money, marrying them to Muslim women and thus producing kids of the community,” the chief minister claimed.
The statement of the chief minister has i nv i t e d sharp reaction from the PFI. Its state-unit p re s i d e n t N a s a r u d - deen Elam a r a m said, “The charges are baseless and not suited to the CM’s office. It will only aid communal polarisation in Kerala. This is to get Hindu votes. The CPM leadership should clarify if this is the official view of the party.”
Achutanandan’s comments gain significance given that LeT South India commander and Bangalore blasts accused Tadiyantavide Nazeer had told his interrogators that the plan was to Islamize the state by 2050. Also in August 2009, the Kerala High Court had asked the police to investigate charges that there was a racket operating in the state which aimed at luring youth to Islam by feigning love.

Now who will go beyond Muralitharan’s 800?

2010-07-24T00:58:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
When I began to pay attention to cricket, Dennis Lillee was the ultimate bowler. The Australian fast bowler had 355 wickets when he bowed out of Test cricket. At that time, it appeared such an impossible task for anyone to overcome those numbers. Or in any case, the man would have been bloody tired to do that, as the English fast bowler Fred Trueman said when he became the first bowler to cross the 300 threshold in Tests.
On July 22, 2010, Muttiah Muralitharan, the Sri Lankan wrist-spinning off-spinner retired from Test cricket in Galle, completing 800 Test wickets, with the last ball of his illustrious career. 800 wickets in 133 Tests!
But in Galle, on Friday, there were no traces of Muralitharan being bloody tired. He still sported his winsome smile as Mahela Jayawardene completed the catch to dismiss Indian rabbit Pragyan Ojha.
Even Lillee, the unabashedly aggressive Aussie, would not have dreamed about such a fantastic figure during his playing days. For a cricket fan, 800 wickets, anyway, was a mind boggling thought in the early 1980s.
Now the question is that will anyone in the future of the game go beyond the mark of 800? Shane Warne, may be the complete spin bowler, the one with prodigious turn and classical action and aggression, in the history of the game, left his pursuit with an awe-inspiring tally of 708 wickets. India’s own Anil Kumble finished, far too away, with 619 wickets in 132 Tests.
Before Lillee rushed through international batting line-ups, the bowling record for the maximum number of wickets was with the West Indian off-spinner Lance Gibbs (309). I wonder whether anyone remembers Gibbs in the glut of wickets now?
Yes, Sharad Pawar is determined to spread cricket into Russia, USA and many other European countries. There could come a time when India would be playing Tests against Latvia, Serbia and Ghana. When Lillee was playing Sri Lanka was taking baby steps in Test cricket. There was no opposition called Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.
You cannot say with certainty that no bowler will overcome Muralitharan’s 800. Yes, Muralitharan had some unfair advantage thanks to his freakish action. He was the only wrist-spinning off-spinner in the history of the game. The Sri Lankan was a bowler with a freak action much to the chagrin of not only the irascible Australian umpire Darrell Hair, who no-balled him repeatedly during a Test Down Under, but India’s pristine practitioner of the craft, Bishan Singh Bedi too. Bedi who called Muralitharan a thief, however, saluted Muralitharan as a man of great qualities when the Sri Lankan Tamil retired after inflicting an embarrassing 10-wicket defeat on Indians and ruined captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s honey moon trip.
But to argue that Muralitharan’s success sprang from his action would be a denial of reality. Remember, Shane Warne, too, had taken an astonishing tally of 708 wickets without the benevolence of nature’s freakish side. But make no mistake, if anyone would scale the Mount of 800, it has to be a slow bowler with an appetite huge enough to scare away batsmen from the crease.

To ban or not to ban: Editorial in Hindu

2010-07-23T01:19:00.001+05:30

Editor’s note: This editorial appeared on July 16, 2010

From the time President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in June 2009 that the burqa was “not welcome” in France, it has been clear that his government was serious about introducing a ban on the veil worn by some Muslim women and on another more severe garment called the niqab, which leaves only the eyes uncovered. The French government is now closer to this after the National Assembly approved legislation for it. It has to be passed by the Senate next, and a constitutional Council could yet void it. The proposed law is very much in line with France's inspiring secular traditions that keep religion strictly out of the public sphere, where the social contract is based exclusively on universal values enshrined in the country's laws. In April 2010, similar legislation was approved by the Belgian parliament's lower house, and a vote by the upper house is awaited later this year. Other European countries are also mulling a ban on the veil. But France, which passionately values a secular national identity over the ethnic or religious affiliations of its immigrants, has never shied away from forcing the pace on complex issues relating to religion and their place within the larger national identity. If this was first aimed at checking the influence of the Catholic church on public life, the spotlight is now on Islam. The proposed ban makes eminent sense through a feminist lens. The burqa (not to mention the niqab) is unquestionably an oppressive garment that seeks, as Mr. Sarkozy pointed out, to keep those who wear it imprisoned “behind a screen.” It is nowhere prescribed in the Koran but has been imposed on millions of women by sections of the clergy — all of them male — who have interpreted religious texts to suit their backward-looking religious or political agenda. That many Muslim women seem willing to embrace the veil these days as a symbol of their piety, modesty, and virtue, or as a political statement of their Muslim identity, is no indication of female agency. It speaks more of their successful co-option in a misogynist project that is the antithesis of liberté, égalité, fraternité — values that go back to the French Revolution and are the proclaimed national motto of France.
However, there is a serious downside to the move to ban the burqa and the niqab. In the post-9/11 atmosphere, such a law is likely to be viewed as an instrument to persecute and humiliate Muslims.
It could lead to further radicalisation within the fold and inflame tensions between majority and minority populations in Europe. The reality is that only a small number of women in France's estimated five million Muslim population wear the veil. Fears that a ban could end up criminalising Muslims in European societies are not misplaced, given the Islamophobia in the west. The right-wing French government's unfavourable disposition towards immigrant populations does not help either. In March 2010, the Council of State, which will examine the proposed ban for its constitutionality, observed that a complete ban might, in fact, violate the French Constitution and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Conventional Freedoms. It seemed more comfortable with the idea of a limited ban rooted in reasons of security. But even if the Council strikes down the law, the intriguing social, philosophical, and political issues the burqa and the niqab raise will not go away. For literary guidance on what might happen if the tension between an uncompromisingly secular state and radical religious identity assertion — focussed in this case on the mysterious phenomenon of the “headscarf girls” committing suicide in Kars in Turkey during the early 1990s — is allowed to sharpen and grow, there is no better text than Orhan Pamuk's magnificent novel, Snow.

Review: Man of Glass by Tabish Khair

2010-07-20T00:08:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
Tabish Khair, the Denmark-based poet and author, has attempted something refreshing by transcreating the works of three writers from across centuries, cultures, literary genre and language in his new collection of poetry, Man of Glass. The result, then, is lines such as
“If blood doesn’t drip from every line of love-verse
It’s only fit to go on sale with Dan Browns.”
That was a re-rendering of Ghalib for you. In Man of Glass (in an obvious reference to Hans Christian Andersen) Khair has retold Kalidasa’s play Abhijnana Shakuntalam. The poet, however, makes it clear that his Shakuntala is the daughter of a secular Muslim scholar, brought up in an environment of quoted Urdu poetry and given a classical Hindu name by her parents; her loss and betrayal take place in a world where the total income of 582 million people in the developing countries is about 10m per cent of the combined income of the world’s top 200 billionaires. May be, it’s an ideal situation to have a crisis of identity as happened to Kalidasa’s Shakuntala.
Khair makes deft use of Kalidasa, Ghlaib and Andersen to discuss and reflect on contemporary issues such as immigration, strife in Iraq and Afghanistan, love and genocide, neatly giving his poetry a certain cutting edge and bluntness.
The best of poetry and prose capture truths that hold good across centuries and barriers. May be after sifting through news wires for a living, the following lines strike you hard.
“Once when he returned with his face slapped,
I took him out of school
Not you, I told the teacher, not you
Life has blows enough in its bloody bag for him.”
Quite true. And to those who ask what profit is there in reading poetry, one should say that it may help you lessen the impact of the crushing blows life reserves for you.

Title: Man of Glass
Author: Tabish Khair
Publisher: HarperCollins

Review: Of Love And Politics by Tuhin A Sinha

2010-07-13T20:40:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
The conviction with which young, urbane Indians take to writing in English leaves one shaken and stirred. The fact that there are publishers to ink such stuff should make many aspiring writers reach for their notebooks and netbooks.
Tuhin A Sinha has come up with his third novel, Of Love And Politics, which he modestly describes as ‘his most ambitious work till date.’ May be. But let’s have first things first. Editors at Hachette India could have done a better job and avoided instances such as “Aditya thinks of me as his girlfriend. The mismatch makes us converse about everything under the sun, expect us.”
Sinha, apparently, has tried to pull off a Rang De Basanti of a paperback through Of Love and Politics. Despite doing some research, Sinha’s writing exposes himself as politically naïve and not one with enough experiences in love either. PowerPoint presentations and punctuating pages with names of leaders of national political parties would not make a political novel. Sinha fails to offer any insights into the Indian political theatre or into the life and times where we love and live.
The author banks too much on contemporary political events to anchor the love triangle among Aditya Samar Singh, Chaitali Sen and Brajesh Ranjan, the youth brigade in Congress, CPI (M) and BJP respectively.
There, however, is no doubt about the kind of reader Sinha is targeting. There is the young, metro professional with his sneering cynicism towards the political class and yearning for change. Sinha, by getting Aditya, Chaitali and Branjan to walk out of their ‘outdated’ political franchises and launching a new party, Nation Building and Development League, fulfills the fantasy of the young middle class India. Finally, letting the central characters speak for themselves is not such a bad narrative idea but, in this instance, Sinha leaves the reader wondering whether he should turn the page at all.
Title: Of Love And Politics. Author: Tuhin A Sinha
Publisher: Hachette India

Six Investment Tips to Take Away From World Cup: Matthew Lynn

2010-07-13T20:33:00.000+05:30

Commentary by Matthew Lynn(Bloomberg)
Some people might think the hours you spent over the last month sitting around, drinking beer and watching the soccer World Cup being played in South Africa was a waste of valuable time.
Of course, they are wrong. Between cries of “no way was that offside!” in front of the television, some of us have been carefully constructing an investment portfolio that will make us a fortune in the next year.
After all, there were plenty of lessons in business, management and investment being displayed right in front of us. You just had to look hard.
Not convinced? Well, here are six stock tips you can take away from the World Cup:
The English lesson: Globalization can go too far.
The English Premier League is the most international in the world. The top teams such as Manchester United and Chelsea have drawn talent from everywhere. The theory is that even though there are few spaces left for English players, those who do make it through will benefit from playing alongside the best players. Er, wrong. Two dismal performances at successive World Cups by the English team suggest the national game is in sad decline. You can take all the global village stuff too far. In the end, people and companies do best when they stay true to what they are and who they are.
Tip: Buy Club Mediterranee SA. The vogue among big companies is to become ever more international, losing sight of their heritage as they create blander and blander products that are stripped of any distinctive national characteristics. A few, such as the French resort chain Club Med, remain rooted in the culture and traditions of their home country. They will do better in the long run.
The French lesson: Egos will get you nowhere.
For the English, the one consolation of a terrible World Cup was that the French were even worse. France’s star striker Nicolas Anelka was sent home for insulting coach Raymond Domenech at halftime while the team got beaten by Mexico. Afterwards, the players revolted, and the team was eliminated in the first round. It was humiliating. But when the egos get out of control, you are in big trouble.
Tip: Sell Barclays Plc. The British bank used to be mainly a retail financial-services company concentrating on the U.K. market. Now its Barclays Capital unit is a big competitor on Wall Street. Can it keep all those investment-banking egos under control? Dream on.
The Korean lesson: Isolation doesn’t work.
There were two Koreas playing in this World Cup: the North and South. While South Korea played impressive, free-flowing football and were unlucky to be knocked out by Uruguay, the North was just embarrassing, as anyone who watched their 7-0 drubbing by Portugal will testify. The contrast couldn’t have been more stark, and the lesson was a simple one. The country that was open to the rest of the world was developing fast, while the one that closed itself off was getting nowhere.
Tip: Sell Apple Inc. Sure, everyone loves those iPhones, iPads and iKettles, or whatever the geniuses at Apple come up with next. But it believes in closed systems that it controls absolutely. Sooner or later that will be its downfall.
The Italian Lesson: History counts for nothing.
Nobody came into the tournament with a better record than Italy. OK, they are a boring team, but that didn’t stop them from winning in 2006. Everyone knows the Italians will do fine even when they are complete rubbish -- that’s what the record books show. Except not this time. They were terrible, and they went home on the first plane.
Tip: Sell Toyota Motor Corp. True, it has been the most successful car company on the planet. But a couple of serious product recalls suggest Toyota has lost it. A great track record won’t help.
The German Lesson: Transform yourself with style.
We all know what the German team is like: Italy with worse haircuts. Dour, efficient, methodical and hard-working, they would grind their way through the tournament, and probably win it on penalties. But, hey, not this time. The Germans played attacking football that made the Brazilians look dull, and had the neutrals cheering them on. Only the ruthlessness of the Spanish defense snuffed out their creative flair. The moral? Give yourself a style makeover and the world will love you.
Tip: Buy Burberry Group Plc. A couple of decades ago, we thought it was the company that made those raincoats your grandmother wore. Not anymore. Now Burberry is one of the coolest brands around -- and likely to stay that way.
The Spanish Lesson: Keep believing and you’ll get there in the end.
Let’s be honest, we didn’t think they could ever do it. They probably didn’t think they could do it, either. One of the best soccer nations on Earth, but Spain had never been past the quarter-finals before. This time, they taught us all a lesson in perseverance. Hang in there. Don’t give up the faith. And you will make it in the end.
Tip: Buy BP Plc. Alright, the oil keeps gushing from that well. The chief executive is a joke. They have more lawsuits pending than the Chileans have yellow cards. But they can come back from that one day. They just need to believe, that’s all.

The Honest Always Stand Alone by CG Somiah: A Review

2010-07-10T20:16:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
Honesty should be always vouchsafed by others but to a large extent, author CG Somaiah, who has had a remarkable career with Indian Administrative Service, has succeeded in portraying himself as a man and officer of unshakeable integrity in his memoirs. Somiah served as comptroller and auditor general, central vigilance commissioner and union home secretary in a distinguished career. His service story, The Honest Always Stand Alone, manages to engage the reader and his courage of conviction and firmness of opinion clearly come across the pages.
Though boastful and bashful at times, as befitting someone who has brushed shoulders with decision makers during a crucial time in independent India’s history, Somiah’s effort would make interesting reading even for people who are not immediately connected with the civil service. Somiah, however, disappoints us by holding back details that would have rocked the state and national politics.
For example, Somiah prefers to keep the ‘inside information’ surrounding the Bofors gun deal that rocked the political career of the young prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to himself though claiming to know much more than you and me. Instead, the author lets us know that he used to play tennis with Ottavio Quattrochi, the Italian businessman accused of acting as a conduit for bribes in the scandal.
Somiah, however, does offer a telling glimpse into the feckless nature of the Indian political class when he narrates the then home minister Buta Singh’s grovelling towards the minister of state Arun Nehru, since the latter enjoyed the confidence of Rajiv Gandhi.
It has often been said that IAS is the steel frame (or it was) of the nation. Somiah, proudly, and justifiably stakes claim that his backbone lent it further solidity. May be, being a Kodava, a community that has been celebrated for its inimitable and often intrepid approach to life, has helped Somiah a great deal when choosing between the meek and the bold.

Mark of the Taliban: Editorial in The Hindu

2010-07-07T18:02:00.000+05:30

The act of a gang that cut off the hand of a college teacher, by wielding an axe on a thoroughfare in Kerala in broad daylight, had Talibanism writ all over it. The State has been noted historically for the peaceful co-existence of different faiths and beliefs. This act of barbarism, however, points to the rise of blood-thirst driven by religious fundamentalism that certain fringe elements may be seeking to impose on the State. That it was a planned operation carried out with brutal intent adds to the shock. Without reference to the nature of the alleged provocation behind the act, what has happened is a challenge to civilised society and the rule of law. After all, the management of the college concerned had suspended the teacher for an inappropriate reference to the Prophet that appeared in an examination question paper and apologised for the aberration. The law has been taking its course and a criminal case against the teacher was being pursued. What the criminal fanatics have managed to do is to put on the defensive those who support the secular-democratic cause, and give a handle to majoritarian intolerance. The culprits need to be apprehended and prosecuted immediately.
If there is a silver lining here, it is that every political party in Kerala, organisations across the country representing both the religions concerned, and democratically minded sections of society have been prompt in condemning Sunday's savagery. Hearteningly, several Muslim youth organisations came forward to offer blood to the victim as he lay fighting for life in a Kochi hospital. To its credit, the State government has acted swiftly and decisively at every stage — a fact acknowledged amply during the course of a discussion in the State Assembly. The House condemned the incident in one voice. Most important, the atrocity did not trigger any communal backlash. But there is a larger lesson here. Freedom of expression has increasingly come under attack from religious fanatics in democratic and secular India and it is the duty of society and the political system to intervene more effectively to defend those who are targeted even if they express unpopular views. At the same time, those who work in academia and those who value intellectual freedom and creativity must be sensitive to the political-social contexts, which are quite often fragile if not volatile. All sections must unite to ensure that the heart-rending tragedy of a teacher making a misjudgment and ending up losing his hand to an act of Talibanesque savagery is never repeated.

Barbarians on the prowl: Editorial in The New Indian Express

2010-07-07T17:58:00.000+05:30

What Kerala witnessed on Sunday when a college lecturer returning from church was waylaid, dragged out of his car and his right palm was chopped off is horrendous, to say the least. The victim, T J Joseph, earned infamy in March last when he was accused of preparing a question paper in which a blasphemous reference was made to Prophet Mohammed. Nobody in his senses would approve of any action that wounds the religious feelings of any section of people. When he was promptly arrested on several criminal charges, everybody considered it as just desserts for the ‘learned man’. On its part, the management of Newman College, Thodupuzha, suspended him from service. Thus, by no stretch of the imagination could it be concluded that he had gone scot-free.
The question paper he prepared was based on the writing of a Muslim littérateur about the imaginary dialogue a mad man had with the Almighty. Joseph is alleged to have interpolated the passage with a mischievous reference to the Prophet. Whether he personally did it or it was done by someone else at the printing stage is what the court would go into before taking an appropriate decision in the case. Under the Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence that is still followed in the country, Joseph is entitled to the benefit of the doubt till the prosecution is able to prove conclusively the serious charges against him. Thus, in the eyes of the law, he is an innocent person, entitled to protection by the state. Unfortunately, the state failed in its duty as it preferred to be an onlooker in this case.
The police was told that unidentified persons were threatening Joseph ever since he was released on bail. Given the kind of protest the question paper had evoked and the communal nature of the issue, the government should have provided him security. But by failing to do so, it made the task of the religious ‘warriors’ easier. When Islamists threatened Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, he was given protection, not because the British government approved of his writing but because it did not want anyone to take the law into his own hands. Under the rule of law, there are laws to deal with offenders like Joseph. That job cannot be delegated to the so-called custodians of Islam who, by cutting off his palm, have shown that they have only utter contempt for the rule of law.

Barbaric act : Editorial in Deccan Herald

2010-07-07T17:55:00.001+05:30

The brutal attack on a professor of a college in Kerala last Sunday when he was returning from a church service was shocking in its intent and barbarity. His right palm was chopped off by a gang that waylaid and attacked him. He sustained other injuries too; his mother and sister were also attacked. He had made a controversial reference to Prophet Mohammed in an internal question paper prepared for students of the college in March this year. The reference is considered to have been derogatory. All sections of society had condemned the professor’s action which hurt religious sentiments. He was suspended by the college management when the controversy broke out and was arrested. The matter is before the court and if the charges are proved he stands to earn punishment. There is still some confusion about at what stage the offending words found their way into the question paper. Whether he was solely responsible for the offence or not is yet to be decided. In any case a public apology was made and it was made clear that there was no intention to hurt the feelings of any community.

But the punishment meted out to him by the gang of attackers was terrible and deserves the strongest condemnation. It is difficult to imagine that such cruelty and bestiality is resorted to a democratic society. Physical punishment of the kind the professor was subjected to has rarely been heard of in the country. It flouts the rule of law and all norms of civilised conduct. Nobody should be allowed to take the law into their hands and punish offenders for their crimes, however serious the offences are. Such violence becomes all the more dangerous when religious sentiments are involved. It can lead to communal discord and go out of control.

Some of the attackers have been arrested and the police are on the lookout for others. They reportedly belong to an organisation called the Popular Front of India and had planned the attack for over a month. A number of Muslim organisations have rightly condemned their misdeed, asserting that it was most un-Islamic, and demanded the strongest punishment for them. Members of the Jamaat-e-Islami donated blood for the professor in hospital. The culture of intolerance and violence that has been growing in the country has created the environment for the dastardly act. Only very few subscribe to that culture but they poison the society.

How far is Saudi Arabia from Kerala?

2010-07-05T22:47:00.004+05:30

By John Cheeran
How far is Saudi Arabia from Kerala?
Saudi Arabia is a state of mind, a state of mind intolerant of other points of view. It comes as no surprise to me that Kerala is not far from that theocratic state as evidenced by the chopping off act on Sunday in Thodupuzha. Taliban have infiltrated Kerala’s body politic for a long time and the vengeful act that reeks of the primitive and barbaric justice system that Saudi Arabia swears by was put into practice by a band of thugs who swear by Islam.
On Sunday a university professor’s right wrist was chopped off in Thodupuzha, Kerala, by people who carry, what’s generally regarded as Muslim names.
It was no ordinary crime.
It was religious backlash and the man under the axe, TJ Jospeh, a Malayalam professor, was suspended by Newman’s College, Thodupuzha, for including a question derogatory to the founder of Islam, in an examination paper. Now, Joseph, who went into hiding after those who were hurt by that question paper, raised a ruckus, had been arrested by the state police and later released on bail.
All that is fine. You can get offended for whatever slights you could imagine. In our democracy that has become a fundamental right for fundamentalists.
The point is that should we accept the rule of law or should we lie back and let Taliban take hold over us?
I have noticed that those who have a stake in this issue, LDF and UDF politicians, and especially, the leadership of assorted Muslim organizations in the state have condemned the barbaric act. They have made the routine noises about how violence is antithetical to Islam, etc.
It would be naïve to consider the chopping of the wrist as a stray event. May be no religion, on the face of it, allows for a vendetta as barbaric as that happened in Thodupuzha. But there has been a consent built over a period of time various religious communities that justifies any ugly and revolting deed if it is consecrated in the name of God.
It’s difficult to read Muslim mind in these troubled times and especially if you live in Kerala. Away from the public glare there has been a Muslim consciousness at play, fundamental in its thought, and fanned by petrodollars from the Middle East. And this Taliban are at work in various disguises, declaring at times solidarity with social causes only to further its own narrow and divisive agenda.
The intolerance against perceived slights to religious prophets and retaliations, purely inspired by a barbaric justice system, such as in Thodupuzha are dead give-aways that there is a tacit approval from the Muslim community for such heinous acts.
To confront this Taliban is the immediate responsibility of the Muslim leaders in Kerala. You cannot take the grievance that India has been unfair to Islam’s followers beyond a point.
Mind you, this is India. This is not Afghanistan. This is not Saudi Arabia. The political leadership on the left and right may well kiss the Middle East arse, but those who talk about pogrom in Gujarat should also remember that you cannot butcher men in the name of the most merciful.

The Loose Vuvuzela: Roger Cohen on Maradona

2010-06-22T18:43:00.000+05:30

Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared in The International Herald Tribune

By Roger Cohen
JOHANNESBURG — They’re calling him the World Cup’s “loose vuvuzela.” They’re swooning as he spreads the love, jumping into his players’ arms like some cuddly bear with diamond earrings and no neck.
They can’t get enough of his deadpan quotes, as when he responds to a question about his kiss-and-hug management style by saying he still prefers women, specifically his girlfriend “Veronica who is blonde and 31.”
At 49, Diego Armando Maradona is neither blonde nor 31. But he is Mr. Unscripted in the age of spin, the Hugo Chávez of global soccer. As coach of an outrageously talented Argentine team, one thrown together in the image of his own extravagant skills, Maradona is having a good World Cup.
To genius much is permitted. And so it should be.
The contrast with some of Maradona’s more pinched rivals, including the French coach Raymond Domenech and the England manager Fabio Capello, could not be more extreme. Domenech wears the expression of a man who’d rather be reading Foucault as “Les Bleus” implode and then take to the barricades in open mutiny.
As for Capello, he’s imposed a regimen so strict that his players, deprived of their WAGs (wives and girlfriends), look vaguely unhinged. Many European prisons allow conjugal visits; not Capello. Wayne Rooney has gone on a walkabout. The body language of the English players suggests dead men walking.
England right now is to football what the vuvuzela is to music: one note going nowhere.
I’ve had my doubts about Capello since he stripped John Terry of the English captaincy earlier this year because he had an affair. For an Italian, that seemed a little rich. Discipline is all very well, but Terry’s a leader and would have led. England doesn’t do the barricades, but insurrection is close.
So here we are, 10 days into the first African World Cup, a power-shift event. And it’s proving a nice illustration of the effectiveness of asymmetrical warfare.
Traditional powers with the big guns are struggling: Italy, France, England — even Germany and Spain. The insurgents — Paraguay, New Zealand, Slovenia, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico — are pulling off deadly ambushes (and for once the gutsy Americans are not targets.) Switzerland, in its 1-0 defeat of Spain, proved unpredictable for the first time in history. The cuckoos lost their clocks.
Even North Korea, with zero fans — Kim Jung-Il would not allow them out of his police state — showed surprising tenacity until their Portuguese debacle. They’ve been using a public gym (“Virgin Active” in Eco Park) to train because they could not afford a facility.
Sorry, they do have 100 “fans,” a platoon of Chinese nationals hired by Pyongyang and not available for interview. In the realm of the bizarre, this outfit runs Maradona close.
But the Argentine coach — who tried more than 100 players during the qualifying rounds — wins. He’s already told Pelé to “go back to the museum.” He’s dismissed the UEFA president, Michel Platini, as a know-all (before mumbling an apology).
In shiny suit and shiny brogues, he prowls the demarcated pitch-side area during matches, kicking imaginary balls, looking every inch the caged coach. When it’s over he plants a kiss on each player. No Foucault for him, no training manual, no teleprompter, no quote masseur. He’ll go with the wisdom of the Buenos Aires shanties.
I said genius. Maradona had it. His “goal of the century” in the 1986 quarter-final against England, when he weaved past six players, lives in memory, as does his “Hand of God” effort in the same game. Both were outrageous. His battles against drugs and obesity since retirement have been as public as they were painful. Like his country, which has every gift but often squandered them as it meandered through the 20th century, he’s veered this way and that.
But passion never left him. Maradona knows there’s no ballet without a prima ballerina.
In the age of the smothering midfield — using not one but two defensive midfield players is the new, new thing here — Maradona is having none of it. He’s playing a winger of silky skills, Angel Di María, the rampaging Carlos Tévez, and that clinical poacher, Gonzalo Higuaín. Above all, in his own No. 10 shirt, he has a fellow genius, and fellow little guy (at all of 5-foot-7), the 22-year-old Lionel Messi.
Messi’s destruction of South Korea in Argentina’s 4-1 victory did not include a goal of his own (Higuaín got three) but included everything else in a footballer’s repertoire: dinked passes of breathtaking subtlety, mazy dribbles, swerving crosses, staggering ball control at speed, and 360-degree vision of the pitch. Maradona has rightly told Messi to play wherever he likes.
The beautiful game has traditionally been Brazil’s preserve. But Dunga, the Brazilian coach, is one of those two-holding-midfielder guys. He’s Mr. Dour to Argentina’s Mr. Drama. Still, Brazil must samba and in Robinho and the awakening Kaká, there have been flashes. An epic battle looms. Brazil may have the discipline Argentina lacks in the breach.
For now, however, the loose vuvuzela approach has trumped WAG control. Score one for the little guys and for unscripted living.

When Process Was Given A Red Card

2010-06-18T20:11:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran

Joachim Loew’s Germany may still go on to win the 2010 World Cup in Johannesburg on July 11 but that story can wait for now.

In a match that could well define this World Cup, Serbia delivered a killer blow to a young Germany that had unleashed a new brand of attacking football with a steely touch of precision in their first match against Australia.

On Friday it was not merely a goal that separated Germany from Serbia and victory. It was a cataclysmic breakdown of the renowned process that upset Germany and their multitudinous fans across galleries, living and board rooms.

For, many inside and outside of football world had admired and raved about the process that Germany had set up and made a part of the lives of their footballers. It was much more than about practices, it was about a culture of getting and doing things right.

It was that process that the faceless footballers from a war-ravaged Serbia shred into tatters in Port Elizabeth. The much vaunted process was given a red card when Miroslav Klose was sent off the field for his second yellow card of the match. May be no process offers a shield against referees such as the Spaniard Alberto Undiano who could have let off the German. It also helped one to scratch beneath the beautiful façade of attacking instincts that Germany showcased against Australians the other day.

I’m sure those who had made a fetish out of the German process were left speechless when Lukas Podolski failed to convert the second half penalty kick. Process, after all, is about getting your basics right without being riotously carefree.

That Germany could not score not even once against Serbia who were hustled by Ghana in their opening match is hard to fathom for their fans. The youth, of course, has its own advantages but when pushed against the wall this German side lacked the grit and tenacity of a Karl Heinz-Rummenigge, Rudi Voeller and Lothar Mathaus.

And one cannot ignore the most important lesson after 90 minutes of wasted opportunities and bravado. Grand theories such as processes come apart beyond a point. Theories are fine but humans are yet to write an equation that erases all ‘human’ errors from the board of manoeuvres.

When Spain was stabbed by the Swiss knife the other day not many were alarmed since they were considered as chokers and underachievers when it comes to a theatre as big as the World Cup though they are the reigning European champions. Friday afternoon was different. It (Germany) was all about explaining success and achievement in terms that could be quantified and replicated elsewhere.

To win and succeed you need head as well as heart. It helps if you have the flair of Brazil, process of Germany, sheer talent of Argentina, doggedness of England, humility of Koreans, tactical nous of Italy and a large slice of luck.
Keep watching.

The Art of Choosing by Sheena Iyengar: A Review

2010-06-10T16:59:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
Beggars cannot be choosers. Sheena Iyengar, a professor at the Columbia Business School, has come up with various case studies on how people arrive at their choices in her The Art of Choosing, but there is nothing in the book that makes one reconsider the opening statement.
The art of choosing is a difficult science to master is the message that Iyengar offers to her readers. She starts with some survival stories and points out how decisions to fight on despite slim chances of making it made all the difference in those people’s lives. Making an informed or inspired choice can make all the difference in your life story.
Iyengar, however, has not succeeded in arriving at a unifying principle that allows anyone to make his or her choices easier. Situations such as Sophie’s Choice will pop up in your life. Iyengar, remember, does not have any tips for Sophie. That being the case, there are some interesting aspects that have been put through the rigours of research such as the famous Jam Study conducted by the author. It tells us that having too many options to choose from is not necessarily a good thing as when customers in a US supermarket were bewildered by the sheer number of choices before them and stayed away from making one. So now many pundits believe that the more is less when it comes to making choices. Some choices are not choices at all. For some of us having to choose is a dilemma bordering on fear.
Culture is an important factor in shaping our ideas about who or what exercises control in a specific situation. There is a marked difference in the way individualist and collectivist cultures go about making their choices. Multiple choices demand that you superthink through the offerings and make your choice. Iyengar’s failure is that her book does not offer any insights while you attempt to superthink through the buffet of choices.

Dhoni's Dharma in the age of IPL parties

2010-05-13T21:09:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
Defeat is easy to explain when compared to victories. Scoreboard lays bare all your fault lines and anyone is free to cast the first stone. Mahendra Singh Dhoni, till the other day the lucky mascot of Indian cricket and captain ice cool, is finding the rise in temperature a bit too hot to handle after India’s disgraceful exit from the T20 World Cup in West Indies.
Dhoni’s ascent to glory started with a T20 World Cup championship title but it was accentuated by India’s early exit from the World Cup held in West Indies when Rahul Dravid and Greg Chappel were in charge of the team management.
Dhoni, captain of the IPL champions Chennai Super Kings, has hinted at the larger pressures at play in the IPL while looking for answers for India’s recent T20 disaster. How can Dhoni blame the IPL as a tournament and its format? Not only his franchise but the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) would be displeased. So Dhoni says it’s not the problem of IPL but players themselves. They need to be a smarter lot to handle temptations such as IPL Afterhours parties and stuff like that.
While ranting against IPL and its decadent parties, let’s not forget that India has lost matches and tournaments even when there was no IPL to add to the non-stop whirl of international cricket. On those occasions, plainly, our cricketers were not good enough to win. After all India won the World Cup in 1983 and has not won the championship since then. The story remains the same. Despite being the No.1 Test side in international rankings, quality of our cricket is still patchy at its best.
IPL or afterhours parties, what counts is the attitude of our heroes towards their primary task, winning matches for India. If you are carrying an injury, you have no business to be part of the squad. You should have the honesty to let the team management and the national selectors know about it and the best available men take your place in the side.
BCCI, it has been reported that, is not happy with Dhoni criticizing IPL for the T20 debacle. It is even said that Dhoni would be stripped of his captaincy soon. Dhoni, like any losing captain, has made errors of judgment in the T20 World Cup and will have to square up to face the consequences. But it is not Dhoni alone who has erred. What about the national selectors? On what basis was Yuvraj Singh selected for the World Cup despite his listless form throughout the IPL?
Now, to the IPL parties. A news channel reporter who was condemned to hang out outside IPL afterhours parties tells me that cricketers, Indian and foreign, had only on thing on their mind during the IPL -- sex with the Bollywood hotties and other assorted starlets who were part of the Lalit Modi gravy train. Nothing wrong with that, especially after coach Gary Kirsten came out with the thesis on how sex improves your strike rate on the field.
Yes, I know and you know that it’s not morality that counts but runs and wickets. But it’s pathetic that some of our leading batsmen can’t handle the ball when it is pitched short. Bowlers can’t hit the line and length that stifles stroke-making. These are basic flaws. After all, hunger for sex should not be at the cost of the hunger for victories. Dhoni, Yuvraj Singh and Harbhajan Singh have a lesson or two to learn from West Indies skipper Chris Gayle and glamour girl Sherylin Chopra.

Known Turf, Unknown Turf: Annie Zaidi

2010-04-28T22:24:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
Of course, Annie Zaidi writes about her known turf in Known Turf, a good thing to do if you are a journalist. Deeply made aware of her religious identity by people around her and shaped by the rigours of journalism, Zaidi has put together a few sketches of India where the predictable rules.
The sneering attitude of men towards women dominates the pages though Zaidi starts her book with a lot of promise by venturing to find out why Chambal is such a fertile terrain for dacoits.
Someone, indeed, threw this book at me and having read Known Turf I’m grateful for that assault. Between the lines, I could recognize Zaidi’s silent wish to be another Arundhati Roy. No crime that is. The true tales narrated by Zaidi did not make me shudder or wonder for the fact that one has been quite familiar with such situations. It is a pity that life has not prepared most of the reporters in English language newspapers in India for a class steeplechase; many ordinary moments in urban and rural life are epiphanies for such tribe when they step out for a story. Zaidi, too, is no exception. Her forays into reporting make no fresh ground but issues that she writes about such as dalit resurgence in Punjab, struggles of weavers in Benares and starvation deaths in MP do deserve readers’ pause.
Zaidi’s anxieties and self-doubts on her beat, at a certain level, assail the reader as when she writes “what do you do when a man minus three limbs in a government hospital trauma ward begins to sing?”
Her attempts to answer questions such as ‘what are you’ and ‘where are you from’ in the latter half of the book, however, should have been restricted to blogosphere.

Make Shashi Tharoor IPL Commissioner

2010-04-24T21:08:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
If I were the President of Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), my man to clean up the IPL mess would have been Shashi Tharoor.
I understand that the BCCI is all set to strip Lalit Modi of the IPL Commissioner’s post, come Monday. Is there anyone better qualified to replace Modi other than Tharoor?
Tharoor loves cricket even though he has other mature loves in his life. He now knows what’s exactly wrong with IPL and cricket administration in India. He, of course, knows to tweet as well as Modi and may be he knows to outbid a few others within the boundaries of the rulebook.
And most importantly, Tharoor does not have a full time job, so can devote his considerable energy to the job at hand. Now that Sunanda Pushkar has given away her sweat equity in the Kochi IPL franchise there is no longer a conflict of interest!
I hope Shashank Manohar and Arun Jaitley read this blog post before Monday.

Why my blood boils when I hear of Tharoor, Sunanda, IPL and Lalit Modi

2010-04-20T22:58:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
Former minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor invoked poet Vallathol Narayana Menon’s famous lines
Bharathamennu Kettal Abhimana Poorithamakanam Antharangam
Keralamennu kettalo thilakkanam namukku chora njarambukalil in Parliament on Tuesday to lend substance to his mentoring of the Kochi IPL franchise.
The nationalist poet had urged Malayalis to swell with pride in their minds when they heard the word Bharath but when they heard the word Keralam blood should boil in your veins.
It has been a tumultuous week for Shashi Tharoor, Sunanda Pushkar and Lalit Modi since April 11 when Modi’s tweet set off a chain of events of which the last is not heard of yet.
It would have been foolhardy on my part to comment on the issue without understanding the facts related to the Kochi IPL franchise. Information about what transpired in the stratosphere of IPL and BCCI is still hard to come by but it is quite evident that a lot is not right with the secret society of BCCI and the uber secret society that is Indian Premier League.
It is now quite clear that Shashi Tharoor made a grave error of judgement when he more than mentored the Kochi IPL franchise. Tharoor has made a fervent appeal to the sentiments of Malayalis when caught in the silly point of sweat equity thanks to the Modi tweet and it is hard even for me to buy into that argument.
Yes, the world of cricket and high politics is not an easy party to gate crash either in New Delhi or Mumbai and racism of different colours are in operation in such elitist places.
But had there been no sweat equity for Sunanda Pushkar, Tharoor could have been justified in his batting for Kerala as an MP from Thiruvananthapuram.
The lesson is that you should not mix your love with your work. You can love your work but cannot work your love. Not that Tharoor does not know this. He, of course, has had much diverse encounters in life than I can ever aspire. But still he was foolish to push for Pushkar’s cause.
Tharoor’s crime was this he forgot that Lalit Modi was the other half of his profile. It did not take much time for Tharoor to figure it out that IPL and Indian cricket is a secret society where players and politicians guard each others facts and figures. You could slough off your morality and integrity and have to be accountable only within that charmed circle. Well, his understanding was quite right but then he would not have bargained for the kind of compromises that you are supposed to make to remain in that secret society. Tharoor made the mistake of becoming one among the cabal even for a short duration and the kind of pacts that are signed and sealed within the 22 yards of IPL would have emboldened him to close his eyes towards the sweat equity provisions to his friend, possibly at the behest of the motely crew of the nascent Kochi IPL franchise.
Tharoor did that and has paid a huge price for the sweat equity worth Rs70 crore.
Having said that I want to reiterate that Tharoor’s decision to mentor the Kochi IPL was a bold move but he should have worked it out without seeking the management brand building expertise of Pushkar. The Union minister for external affairs pushed the boundaries of the imagination for an average MP from Thiruvananthapuram. But what me and others like me were not prepared was the involvement of aunty Pushkar.
I have no qualms with Tharoor’s choice of friends. Let him marry Sunanda Pushkar and do whatever that pleases him.
At 56, Tharoor remains a romantic and that gladdens my heart. Before him Shah Rukh Khan is an inferior monkey. I admire his written words and Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel is one of the finest works in English produced by an Indian author.
But all these do not give him the right to demand for his friend what’s not largely unheard of in corporate world. But, then, again Tharoor would not have asked anything in return for his mentorship. The only thing is that it sounds a bit incredible to me and the rest of India.

The importance of being Krishna and Radha

2010-03-25T20:56:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
So it is said that Krishna and Radha, the most romantic couple in Indian mythology, had a live-in relationship. Most of us didn’t know.
Or we couldn’t look upon that that too was a live-in relationship, with or without the knowledge of Rukmini, the official wife. Thanks, me Lords.
The remark of Supreme Court judges must gladden the hearts of those who are walking outside the ramparts of marriage in India.
A friend quickly points out that how liberal India was till the advent of Semitic religions, especially Christianity and Islam. All our gods and goddesses had a wonderful time, choosing to live the way they wanted. Morality was what suited your desires. There was freedom to chase your dreams.
Sex was a celebration of love and life in India. But, then, it got equated with sin with the arrival of Adam and Eve. Sex became only a process to procreate.
Now that live-in relationships gain in currency, though in a timorous manner, it could have much more influence on the way men look upon women and vice versa, than the 33 per cent reservation for women in Parliament.
The argument goes that marriage protects the rights of women. Well, marriage protects neither the man nor the woman. May be it ensures a better deal for children.
I don’t know.
A live-in relationship demands a firmer commitment from man and woman to ensure that such an arrangement works. And despite the best efforts, if it does not work, then you shouldn’t be chained by the emotional, visceral baggage. All of us deserve second chances to dream again and live again. For that, to wait for six months or a year, and courts to debate over your crimes is a path that we could abjure, if we could afford.
Long live, you and me.

When Krishna and Radha had a live-in relationship…

2010-03-23T20:58:00.003+05:30

Are you in a live-in relationship?
Do you know your puranas well?
The Supreme Court says even Lord Krishna and Radha lived together according to Hindu puranas, and living together is ‘a right to life for a man and woman.’
A Supreme Court bench consisting of Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan, Justices Deepak Verma and BS Chauhan observed that there was no law that prohibited live-in relationship or pre-marital sex.
The apex court made the observation while reserving its judgment on a special leave petition filed by noted south Indian actress Khusboo seeking to quash 22 criminal cases filed against her after she allegedly endorsed pre-marital sex in interviews to various magazines in 2005.
"When two adults want to live together what is the offence? Does it amount to an offence? Living together is not an offence," judges observed while reserving the verdict.
Khusboo has been hounded by criminal trials for expressing her thoughts on pre-marital sex and virginity.
The SC bench said the perceived immoral activities can’t be branded as an offence.
Counsel for the ‘aggrieved’ complainants contended that the comments made by the actress, endorsing pre-marital sex would adversely affect the minds of young people leading to decay in moral values and country's ethos.
Judges refused to buy this argument which is often made in a variety of cases alleging decay of culture, morality and ethos or injury to the religious or behaviour sensibilities of the complainants.
"Please tell us what the offence is and which section of law applies? Living together is a right to life," judges observed while expanding the scope of Article 21 that guarantees to life with dignity, liberty and respect.
Describing Khusboo’s words as her personal feelings, the bench asked the counsel "How does it concern you. We are not bothered. At the most, it is a personal view. How is it an offence? Under which provision of the law?"
The court again countered the counsel who supported a Madras High Court directive, asking the actress to face the prosecution on the charges of obscenity and indecency.
Judges wanted the complainants to produce evidence to show if any girls eloped from their homes after the said interview. "How many homes have been affected, can you tell us?" the bench had a pointed question for the counsel.
When the judges asked whether the complainants have daughters, the counsel replied in the negative.
"Then, how are you adversely affected?" the apex court had another salvo for the complainants and their lawyer.

God’s Own IPL team is an eye-popping moment in Indian cricket

2010-03-21T18:29:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
So finally, after Tinu Yohannan and S Sreesanth, Kerala gets its own IPL team, for an astounding amount of $333 million.
Of course this is great news for Indian cricket and sport in Kerala. The audacity of the Rendezvous Consortium to dream big and bid for an IPL team, believed to be under the tweeting leadership of minister of state for external affairs Shashi Tharoor, need to be celebrated.
Well, the Kerala Cricket Association does not have its own cricket stadium, and the consortium itself has the presence of outsiders in it, but such things should not take away from Kerala’s Own IPL team.
Many would point out that Kerala does not have enough quality cricketers in the small state. But, then, again, many of the existing IPL teams too have a similar situation to tackle with. Look at Chennai Super Kings. It basically runs on the power of Indian skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Matthew Hayden and many other skillful practitioners of the game quite outside of Chennai and Tamil Nadu. So is the case with Rajasthan Royals.
But, make no mistake, the formation of Kochi IPL team will unearth more gritty cricketers from the state. Now that the bidding is over, it’s time for a suitable name for the Kochi IPL team. Kerala Cobras, Kerala Tuskers, whatever it is eventually going to be, this is a great leap into the whirlpool of sport and high finance.
It is also important to notice that unlike the backers of of Deccan Chargers (Deccan Chronicle) and Mumbai Indians (Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries), Rendezvous Consortium has ventured into a field where traditional moneybags in Kerala have shied. It was, no doubt, the biggest business opportunity of the new decade in Kerala and the very fact that the Rendezvous is a coming together for the love of money and cricket in equal measure is a eye-popping moment in the history of Indian cricket.

A few stray thoughts on Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence

2010-03-19T19:54:00.006+05:30

By John Cheeran
Everyone has a right to be happy. Pursuit of happiness, often, is a direct result of pursuit of love. Bitterness, despair and rancour may follow, but just because others have failed to keep the flame of love alive, we should not be scared to look love in the eye.
Orhan Pamuk takes a close look at love and its varied fragrances in his new novel The Museum of Innocence, set in Istanbul at a time when empress Indira Gandhi imposed emergency in India.
When Indians were sighing over love that never could find utterance in word and deed, in Turkey, with its proximity to Europe, it was a time of awakening for lovers. For Sibel, Fusun and Narcihan, making love to the man they loved before getting the seal of marriage was far from a moral dilemma.
More than love, I’m tempted to say, it is happiness that holds together the events spanning more than 30 years in The Museum of Innocence.
Or is it the other way round? Don’t you find true happiness when you are in love that is deep and pure?
Pamuk’s hero, Kemal Bey, starts his story by telling about his happiest moment in life. And, at the end of his obsessive passion, he reminds Pamuk, the writer, of his responsibility to tell the world that he has lived a happy life even though Sibel, the girl to whom Kemal was engaged when his life upended after catching sight of the most beautiful girl in Turkey, Fusun, finds him utterly crushed and spent after the tragic accident in his life.
Emperors have built monuments for their departed loves but I haven’t come across another instance of a lover setting up a museum for his lost love.
It, however, is a moot point that does Kemal’s The Museum of Innocence, deserve that name. There was hardly anything innocent about the love between Kemal and Fusun. Kemal, engaged to Sibel, a pretty and classy girl , and informed about the ways of the world in his 30s, knew pretty well what he was up to when he fell for his radiantly beautiful but poor relative, the 18-something Fusun. Fusun, though not been to Sorbonne, gives herself completely to the passion of Kemal for 41 days. She did not strike any bargain with Kemal while baring her body and soul to her lover. The only thing that she wanted to know from Kemal was that whether he has been sleeping with Sibel. It was a lie that Kemal lived to regret for the rest of his life, when Fusun found out the truth while dancing at the engagement party of Kemal and Sibel at Hilton.
Kemal realises how much Fusun means to him only when she walks away from his life. Kemal’s undoing was his plans of being happy by having a lover while staying married to Sibel. Fusun would have none of that.
Again, most of us cannot even understand when we experience true love or when we lose it. Kemal, to his everlasting credit, realises his mistake and woos an already married Fusun over the next nine years, like a faithful dog, visiting every street where Fusun walked, looking for her scent and anything that reminds him of her.
What takes away from the classic quality of this love story is the fact that Pamuk let Kemal and Fusun unite in body and soul as soon as they found each other; it’s a lie from Kemal that unhinged Fusun and forced her to turn bitter against her cousin and lover.
Despite all the deep machinations, despite the impossible and vexatious demands, remember, Fusun again gives herself to Kemal on a doomed trip of knowing, and settling all old debts. And, in turn, does it make the fatal car crash all the more unbearable for Kemal?
I won’t know.
For, I would have been fortunate to sit next to my Fusun for the rest of my life and listen to and talk to her till the end of time. As Kemal confesses while he is looking for crumbs of emotional comfort at the Keskins’ table during supper for nine years, happiness is being close to someone you love.
How close, one might as well ask, after gazing wistfully at a museum that only has floating memories and sound bites in it.

Lessons In Forgetting by Anita Nair: A Review

2010-03-18T21:15:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
Who doesn’t think about beginning life anew?
Of course, such thoughts punctuate the middle age. Only a few hours ago I read a newswire story saying the middle age begins at 36 and the old stage starts at 58 (that’s in England).
Ah, well. I have recently finished reading Anita Nair’s novel Lessons in Forgetting. Characters in Anita’s novel talk about forgetting and coming to terms with second life. It’s a theme even I’m keen on. Apart from that how good is Lessons in Forgetting as a work of fiction?
Anita Nair, of course, writes well. It is important to admit that, for me, Lessons in Forgetting was the writer’s first book. But often writing well does not make a great work of literature. One may well ask, why should anyone read a particular book?
So let’s ask, why should have I read Lessons in Forgetting?
Does it offer any insights into life, relationships between men and women?
Anita Nair makes a valiant effort to present her work as a map to the minds of corporate trophy wives. It begins when a disillusioned corporate honcho walks out on his homemaker trophy wife. When Anita makes out that Meera (wife) did not know that Giri (husband) was planning to move out it does not cut any ice. Despite the pretty prose, Anita fails to come up with arresting reasons for Giri walking out on Meera, the flimsiest of excuses being lack of funds to climb to another level in life and Meera’s refusal to sell the old but sprawling bungalow somewhere in cozy Bangalore.
It also does not add to the charms of Lessons in Forgetting that Meera has been portrayed as the sacrificial lamb. It’s only after Giri has walked out, Meera knows other men, including the philanderer cine star and Jake, the storm predictor.
Unfortunately, I did not find any insights into man-woman relationships in Lessons in Forgetting. In fact, I felt that Anita Nair forgot how to conclude her lessons. How to finish what you have started used to be a great gift among story tellers. Some of the modern story tellers tend to make it more exciting by leaving it open ended, which, at least in this case, I find a weakness of spirit and craft.
A lot of thought, apparently, has gone into the writing of Lessons in Forgetting, such as weaving in the status of women in contemporary India by skimming the surface on female infanticide in Tamil Nadu. I’m told by a friend that during one of the launches, the book was handed over to a researcher on female infanticide.
Jake and his daughter in a vegetative state do not add to the strengths of this novel which held out so much promise in the beginning.
But I’m happy for one fact.
Meera does manage to stay on her feet in the absence of Giri. She finds a job, manages her responsibilities as a mother and a daughter and slowly accepts that life has more to offer, even though she does not know what exactly is in store for her. For that matter, who knows what has life in store for us?
And the very fact that Meera and readers do not hear anything more from Giri, apart from an email in the aftermath of his walkout, shows that it is possible to move on without dollops of guilt and bitterness on both sides.

IPL-3: Will KKR reverse the slide?

2010-03-12T18:16:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
Who will win the IPL-3?
May be, we should narrow our focus and ask who will win tonight’s contest between Deccan Chargers and Kolkata Knight Riders, with which the event begins in Mumbai.
There is a lot different in 2010 when compared to last year’s 2020. The most important one is the nature of wickets with the game returning to India. Team compositions, however, remain by and large the same. You cannot ignore that there is less turmoil in KKR camp with little hints of experiments.
I believe Kolkata Knight Riders’ supporters have slain a kangaroo or two to propitiate the gods. If everything goes according to script, KKR should beat Deccan Chargers tonight. The underdogs, last year’s wooden spoonists, hurting the champions in the big game.
What a way to start? Eh?
But despite the so called tactical brilliance that Sourav Ganguly brings to the KKR side, Chargers would not be an easy side to beat under the leadership of Adam Gilchrist.
There, however, is no doubt that everyone would love, especially, sponsors and marketing kids, a KKR victory. That will make the event more open, more sexy and more Bollywoodish.
But right now I’m interested only in finding out whether KKR still have the Fake IPL player in their dressing room.

At any moment, all these can end

2010-03-10T20:59:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
This word sticks in my throat
Can’t utter this without upsetting
My kind, patient listener and the world
and neigbhourhood around
You are being selfish, I’m gently reminded.
At any moment, all these can end,
Don’t you know this?
This, this idle talk of an idyll
That one can create by bruising egos
Looking only into you and me
Redrawing the lines of this fading picture
Another world but in this space itself
Another life but without dying
Another song but with new lyrics
Arguments begin and end
Another night walks into the promise of a dawn
Voices crackle in distance; I hear a sigh, my own
Hope fills my heart as I hear your prayer
And the footfalls of a child chasing her stars
I rise, look towards you,
And catch your radiant smile
Caught in the gleam of the days to come

The truth about Indian hockey

2010-03-09T20:08:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
Now that Indian hockey has lived through its customary World Cup convulsions, it is easy to talk about this game dispassionately. The problem with hockey in India is that it has not too many takers. But, then, if you don’t fly into a rage, hockey is not a sport you fall in love with, wherever you are on this planet.
It is a fallacy and fantasy that hockey had huge support base in India once upon a time. Yes, India has won eight Olympic gold medals in the sport, but for most of us that’s an incredible piece of statistics, nothing else. India’s last Olympic gold came in 1980 in Moscow during an enfeebled competition when the US and its allies boycotted the event.
India’s Olympic gold medals did not create a nation-wide support base for the game when it was winning. And it is important to ask why the sport did not catch the imagination of the nation at large. A few north Indian boroughs do not make for a Pan-Indian appeal.
Many ascribe 1983 World Cup triumph for cricket’s astounding popularity in India. But much earlier, in 1975, India had won the hockey World Cup under the leadership of Ajitpal Singh. Did it lead to a surge in popularity for the game? It did not. In fact around the very same time, contours of hockey as a game were redefined.
Modern hockey is a different beast altogether which does not have much resemblance to what Dhyan Chand and his ilk used to play. It’s a fast paced sport and India has to realize that it is yet to master the basics of the new game.
Hockey, as a game, has inherent flaws. Its appeal is limited. That’s why Bolywood hottie Priyanka Chopra and cricket king Virender Sehwag urge you to give your heart to hockey in ads but themselves stay away from the hockey stadium even if it is a World Cup. It’s not a place to be seen.
Hockey is not football, it’s not even cricket.
Hockey is hockey and it is quite sad that not many are willing to watch this sport which definitely calls for a high degree of skills and loads of talent.
And I’m certain that even if India emerges as World Cup winner and Olympic champion in hockey in the coming years, there will not be any increase in the support base for the game. It will remain as a game played by a select few for the pleasure of a select few. It would be difficult for many, and especially hockey watchers, to accept such a viewpoint.
In the next years, sports such as NBA, football and tennis would demand more attention from the Indian public and the space for hockey would be shrinking fast, despite whatever the players would achieve on astroturfs.

What does a woman want?

2010-03-08T22:00:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
I’m against reservations of all sorts and hence, not enthused by the idea, nay, the bill seeking 33 per cent of seats in Parliament for women.
Instead, reservations should go.
Especially, when it comes to what a woman can do or not do in her life and in society. Ordinary woman does not dream to turn the tables on her male counterpart in Parliament. She only wants to have her voice to be heard at her own home, by her gatekeepers and guardians, in most cases, her parents and husband.
Who can reserve that space and freedom for an Indian woman at places where she lives her life? At work place, at home, at public places?
No one, but woman alone can. Yes, of course, men can help them. No doubt about that.
More than a bill in Parliament Indian woman deserves a change in the attitude of society.
And it would be important to remember that often, it is other women who stand in the way of this change in attitude.
A change in attitude both on the part of men and women will lead to women living their lives to the fullest. Such a shift in attitude will only make men’s lives qualitatively better.
Man, fear not woman. Let her dream her own dreams.
Let’s live without handcuffs.
Quite often it is true that no one knows what exactly a woman wants. May be, not even UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi knows it. But, then, there are women and more women. Some of them are happy to take things as they are or eager for a 33 per cent of the Parliament slice.
But what do you offer a woman who wants 100 per cent from her life, not just 33 per cent of dole from her gatekeepers?
A copy of women’s reservation bill, or a page from scriptures?

A prayer with eyes closed

2010-03-02T20:50:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran

I close my eyes but open my mind
To new roads that lie before me
I feel like a bride again at a Swayamvara
Choose wisely, girl, choose wisely

Breaking free from this world is not easy
Oh, how I hate tears, drama and courtrooms
I don’t want to be the wanton one of my clan
Woman like me are told to live for that epitaph
“Here a lies the woman- husband’s pride and daughter’s refuge.”

I have been gazing at a new map
A map marked with old ink
Streets lined with my heart’s deepening desires
Is this dusty path worth its way to happiness?
Is this the road that leads to a new light?

Scarred and scared as I’m
How am I to trust this stranger?
How am I to trust myself?

Lord, Lord of Nandana, can you hear my heartbeats?
Do you know for whom my heart is beating?
Oh, Lord, are you the stranger?
Are you the voice that I hearken to
every day, night and waking moment?

Hear me, answer me and open my heart
Show me the right path and walk with me
So that I can start to dream again

When beggars turned into kings for 70 minutes

2010-03-01T19:06:00.000+05:30

By John Cheeran
On Sunday, it was a 'if wishes were horses moment' for Indian hockey team. It so turned out that beggars were kings at least for 70 minutes of the match against fierce rivals Pakistan in New Delhi, a city that was shaken by the footfalls of refugees in the wake of the vivisection of India.
Let's be honest.
No one, including the team's Spanish coach Jose Brasa, would have believed that India would whip Pakistan they way they did.
India not only dominated the match but scored four goals stamping their authority in no uncertain manner. For the record, I did not expect India to outperform their rivals. In fact I was prepared to watch India sink in after a flurry of well-intended thrusts into the D.
After fighting for their self-respect within the federation and country, Rajpal Singh and his co-conspirators had a tough task. Otherwise they would have been pilloried for their ‘bloody-mindedness’ for asking for what was their due.
To begin a World Cup campaign against Pakistan, that too at home, presents pressures that few can understand. Unlike cricket, which offers a chance for some players to stay above the team's downfall, in games such as hockey and football which calls for team effort at all stages of the game, there are not many escape routes.
On Sunday, it was pretty evident that Brasa had helped the boys to improve their basic skills such as trapping and passing the ball. Even in the matter of penalty corner conversions, not the strength of Indian sides in the past, there is a marked improvement.
For many Indians, the 12th World Cup got over the moment referee blew the whistle on the India-Pakistan game on Sunday. What happens in the remaining days is now merely academic. Indians have won it. Considering the animosity between the two nations in recent times, especially in the wake of 26/11 attacks in Mumbai, blasts in Pune, beheading of Sikhs in Pakistan, hunting down of Indians in Kabul and the botched talks between the foreign secretaries, only the utterly naive could miss the political significance of this classic encounter.
For supporters of India, the battle is over. But not for the Indian team. They have a lot to achieve in the days ahead to redeem the status of the game in this country. For that, they will have to make heavy inroads into the far better orgainsed defences of European teams and emerge as strong contenders for the World Cup.

An ache without any balm

2010-02-25T22:46:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
I never prepared so delicious a meal such as this night.
After all, this feast is in my honour.
As glasses clink in the raised hands
I can feel the stab of shattered shards in my heart.
I poured a little of my blood, still left after all these years of recriminations, to the sauce.
It tastes great, a kind man remarked with that rare parting of lips.
Beloved, you don’t know the taste of my blood, after all these years?
What do you know of me?
An ache without any balm, a cheek without colour
A breath without life, a look without vision
You, in your feigned innocence, know nothing of these.
I was the easy picking.
I was the lamb who waited for the butcher’s knife with no taste of life and love, before or since.
Now, can you see that glint of ingratitude in my eyes, as
I serve and play the perfect host to your unsuspecting but scrutinizing eyes and palates?
If only I could drink from wells other than you
I would have dissolved
I would have merged in muddy rivers
reeking of slush, sweat, rum and dreams
As lights dim during this night,
This anniversary of primal conquest,
Can you recognize the silhouette of rebel and a dreamer
That still prays for deliverance
From you as well as your kindness that kicks me in absent hours?

A poem for indescribable silence

2010-02-24T23:47:00.002+05:30

By John Cheeran
Where are you?
Why this deepening silence?
Every time, I hear a footfall in the corridors of my heart, I think of you.
I know your call will come, that sunshine laughter and timbre of sweetness, sweetened by distance and time.
Days are dreary without you.
Within you I can sense currents of joy and sadness coursing through as clock ticks to the mundane chores.
Morning coffee, breakfast, lunch, dinner, grunts, chidings, a glance of disapproval, an unshed tear and a rare of moment of understanding. Of being poles apart. Like the scarred hearts of a man and woman.
A five course meal, was that the way you marked another millstone? Ah, that extra dose of salt in sambhar almost brought tears to my stomach.
Here I chew on stolen conversations
Vows are easy to be broken as you know by now;
but I will not, but wait till dawn breaks out in the East
So I go on in silence, thinking of you, only of you,
only of you, and only of you.
And search for you in the lengthening shadows around me,
in other voices and faces that stream through
the morning, noon and evening of my consciousness.

When Sachin Tendulkar goes beyond his boundaries

2010-02-24T19:18:00.003+05:30

By John Cheeran
Sachin Tendulkar has become the first cricketer in the history of one-day internationals to score a double century. Who would have thought that the Indian master would go beyond this boundary too, during the longest autumn an international cricketer can ever have?
I, forever a critic of Tendulkar’s ways at the wicket, especially in recent years, have never doubted his stroke-making abilities. It was more a question of his power to stay at the crease, with a string of injuries and other slights thrown at him, including those barbs from that guardian of Marathi Manoos, Bal Thackeray, making his comfort zone shrink at an alarming rate. The fact that Tendulkar has crossed this milestone in an era of Twenty20 shows how young he remains at heart. His appetite for runs remains intact as that of a schoolboy cricketer when he used to pad up for Shardashram School.
Tendulkar has had excellent company in this Indian team when it comes to scoring runs quickly. These days it is no affront to the great cricketer when one timorously points out that Virender Sehwag is the most aggressive cricketer the game has ever seen. In the last 12 months, Tendulkar has reinvented himself and the freedom with which he has batted at Gwalior on Wednesday and earlier against Australians at Hyderabad makes one nostalgic about the way Sunil Gavaskar played his final one-dayers, including that brilliant hundred against Kiwis in the 1987 World Cup.
On any other day one would have dared to talk about the benign nature of the pitch at Gwalior and the ease and brutality with which Indian skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni clobbered the South African bowlers to the exasperation of a nation waiting for Tendulkar to run for that single to complete his unbeaten 200. Or, the inconsequential nature of one more one-day series being played out there for the benefit of brand managers.
No, not on this Wednesday, at least.
Yet, one suspect that after 20 years of top-notch cricket, there still remains a few more Khwaishs for this modern batting great. Scoring a Test triple hundred and winning the World Cup for his country could figure among that list. May be we will never know being the intensely private person that Tendulkar is.

My Name is Terror

2010-02-15T21:32:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
The blast on Saturday night in Pune is a reminder of how inadequate our security system has become. We bemoan inept administration and policing every time lives are lost in the most inhuman manner possible much in the manner of one cursing another inexplicable loss by our national cricket team.
If a day goes without a terror attack in India, the credit should go to your luck. The government does little for you. It’s a government that failed to protect parliament and let militants take a rubber boat to Mumbai.
Terror in India will be combated only when we learn to appreciate the worth of life itself. For us, as long as terror happens in someone else’s backyard that is fine. Such smugness was shattered during the 26/11 attacks but things have been gone back to the square one.
A nation is silly indeed when media and a large chunk of literate society are agitated over the release of a rather inane movie of a rather inane actor. Let’s terror is a 24x7 reality. Vigilance does not end with the second show at midnight.
Instead of My Name is Khan, it’s time you said My Name is Terror. For an average Indian, there are not many choices left with. He has been browbeaten by improvised explosive devices as well as the incompetence of political leadership. Who wants to talk with Pakistan? Who wants to have Pakistani cricketers in the Indian Premier League? Pakistan is a place you send your worst enemy on an all-paid vacation. It is important to love thy neighbour but there are times when you got to shut all your windows and doors when you have a dirty bastard living next to you.
For home minister P Chidambaram and external affairs minister SM Krishna, without any Punjabi baggage to carry around, taking hard decisions on Pakistan should have been easy. In south of India, no one cares if Pakistan gets deleted or not from the global map. But our political leadership still waffles in sentiments and, in turn, we get stabbed in Mumbai, Pune and elsewhere.
My name has been changed. My Name Is Terror.

Players survive as India sinks to the guns of South Africa

2010-02-09T21:22:00.001+05:30

By John Cheeran
A Test match that began so well for India, when it claimed two South African wickets for six runs, including that of skipper Graeme Smith, has gone so awfully wrong in the remaining sessions that host is licking its wounds.
What went wrong for India?
Was it the inclusion of Wriddhiman Saha who made his debut as a specialist batsman? Poor Saha, for all you know this may be the end of the road for the youngster.
India lost by an innings and six runs in Nagpur largely because of its batting failure. It's an oft-repeated story; where some of the protagonists make run but not good enough to shore up the side. Yes, we can again rave about the skills of Virender Sehwag and Sachin Tendulkar and their centuries.
Look at South Africa. Hashim Amla and Jack Kallis set up the match for their side by playing really, really big knocks. That's the essential difference in approach by the two sides and one that separates the winner from the loser and No.1 from No.2.
May be no Test team would have been able to avoid the kind of collapse that India suffered in the first innings. But, then, again efficient sides redeem themselves playing their second innings with purpose. Think Australia. That did not happen in India's case.
Would things have been panned out differently had Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman been part of the squad? I really don't know. In a sense, that is pointless.
But the point is that apart from Sehwag and Tendulkar none really played his part in India's both innings. Gautam Gambhir failed in both innings but none wants to blame him because he has had such a wonderful run in recent times. Subramaniam Badarinath survives thanks to his half-century. Murali Vijay survives as he hung around in the second innings. MS Dhoni survives since he is the hottest brand and the captain of the side.
But half-measures would not help you to become the No.1 side in international cricket.
In the circus that has cricket become there is nothing called ALL IS LOST. You forget and move on. There is Kolkota and then there is another match.
Selectors have made the changes and brought in Suresh Raina, S Sreesanth and Dinesh Karthick. Will these changes eventually reflect in the composition of the playing XI?
Do all these matter, when we are waiting for the IPL curtain to go up?