Is India ready for a Vedic state?

By John Cheeran
Should India move towards a presidential system, an American or French model of governance?  As the election campaign for 2014 Lok Sabha gains momentum BJP is claiming that their candidate is Narendra Modi in all 543 constituencies across India. It is a terrific campaign pitch but we will have to wait and see how aam aadmi considers such a proposition.
Whether India needs to discard its parliamentary, Westminster model system for a presidential, Vedic state is the dominant theme that Tabrik C, a political enthusiast and a perfumer, puts up for discussion in his political thriller ---Prisoner, Jailor Prime Minister (published by Hachette India, Price R350, Pages 320). An apt read as you ponder the fortunes of Rahul Gandhi, Narendra Modi and Jayalalithaa in the coming elections.
Prisoner, Jailor, Prime Minister (PJPM), however, does not get stuck in the immediate. Tabrik looks ahead, pushes India to a standoff against China while coalitions continue to provide the political glue at home.
For someone who describes himself as an expert in predicting the rise and fall of political personalities, Tabrik quite interestingly has called 2014 elections in Modi’s favour but stops short of naming him. He also predicts a mid-term poll exactly two years after the general election of 2014 so that his lithium popping, musical genius of a politician can step in as prime minister for a Federal Front! Tabrik’s hero Siddhartha Tagore is a dark horse riding an unexpected political tsunami and “it was time for the two main national parties to reflect and accept that in just 30 months they had lost the support of the people,” writes Tabrik.

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How To Catch An Elephant

By John Cheeran

To resist the urge to give advice calls for courage. To resist the urge to write ‘how to’ books demands both courage and discipline. One should never deny people an opportunity to keep their tryst with destiny by offering them advice.  

But then there are people who think different. Subroto Bagchi, chairman, Mindtree, gives us lessons in catching elephants, not just being rabbit hunters. The Elephant Catchers (Published by Hachette India, Rs 499) is all about scaling --scaling your business, intellect, reputation and people.          

Bagchi argues brilliantly. To begin with he says great strategy is not the child of reason, it is an act of emotion. He adds that execution of a great strategy is successful only when the people executing it connect to it and understand it.
He then brings in Mahatma Gandhi, as much as Apple’s Steve Jobs brought in Gandhi in his commercial to sell a point. “When Gandhi took on the British empire, all he asked his followers to pursue were two ideas: non-violence and non-cooperation.”

Bagchi writes that these ideas were as naked and simple as Mahatma himself. But it is a difficult job to remember that Gandhi had to call off his non-violent, non-cooperation campaigns each time when his followers went berserk. That’s the problem with grand sounding strategies, they do not work but remain as talking points.

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A navigation guide for you in New Digital Age

By John Cheeran
Can you keep your privacy online? With the US National Security Agency’s Prism programme snooping on social media networks to collect data, you have reasons to be highly sceptical. People who are not on Google, Facebook and Yahoo and not using smartphones are becoming a minority across the world. The digital age in which we are living has become an uncertain place.
Eric Schmidt, executive chairman, Google, and Jared Cohen, director, Google Ideas, warn us about the consequences of going online in a brilliant book The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (Published by Hachette in India, Rs 650).
Five billion more people are poised to come online. By 2025, the majority of the world’s population will, in one generation, have gone from having virtually no access to unfiltered information to accessing all of the world’s information through a device that fits in the palm of the hand.
If the current pace of technological innovation is maintained, most of the projected eight billion people on Earth will be online, write Schmidt and Cohen.
The authors raise an important question-- will the digital empowerment of individuals result in a safer world, or a more dangerous one? They don’t have the answers but try to chart out the scenario that may unfold before us.
Any stuff you keep online is vulnerable. Identity will be the most valuable commodity for citizens in the future. How to protect it? There is no delete button in digital world. Isn't that a frightening piece of knowledge?
WikiLeaks cofounder Julian Assange believes in the dictum of ‘information wants to be free.’ Free-information activists say the absence of a delete button ultimately strengthens humanity’s progress toward greater equality, productivity and self-determination.
But the absence of a delete button also presents challenges.
Schmidt and Cohen do not address whether secrecy and privacy are the same. As an individual you have a right to privacy, but do you have a right to secrecy? Public interest should be the key to unlock this question.
The authors caution us that if we are on the web, we are publishing and we run the risk of becoming public figures—it’s only a question of how many people are paying attention, and why. You are always under surveillance in the digital world.
Security and privacy are a shared responsibility between companies, users and the institutions, write Schmidt and Cohen. They admit that companies like Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook are expected to safeguard data, prevent their systems from being hacked into and provide the most effective tools for users to maximize control of their privacy and security.
But they also make it clear that it is up to users to leverage these tools. “Each day you choose not to utilize them, you will experience some loss of privacy and security as the data keeps piling up.” The option to delete data is largely an illusion.
The irony is that privacy is in danger but we don't even get our basic information right, the kind of information no one has withheld from us. Take the case of former railways minister Pawan Kumar Bansal, as an example. Did we know about the kind of environment in which Bansal was operating as a politician?
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Have A Little Faith by Mitch Albom: A Review

By John Cheeran
Have A Little Faith does not make you wiser but lets you have a peek into life and beyond.
This book is all about faith and belief. You believe what you want.
And Mitch Albom tells how Albert Lewis, a rabbi and Henry Covington, a pastor, overcome their self-doubt to lead a faithful life and inspire many around them to find their own paths to truth. Albom spends eight years stepping closer to Lewis. Albom was skeptical when the rabbi asked for a eulogy for him. In trying to figure out Lewis, the author, a Jew himself, rediscovers him.
The narrative running parallel to that of Lewis must be quite common now. A down and out man finally listens to the God’s call as the last resort. Save me, and I will serve you. What makes Henry Covington, a convict and drug pusher, stand out here is the equanimity he brings to his life after embracing a new path. He does not beg for assistance from those he bumped into when confronted with issues that were so basic that without which his I’m My Brother’s Keeper Ministry would have folded long ago.
Covington puts his trust in God and waits. And has no complaints. “The Lord will pay us back,” Covington is confident. Faith is different to different people but then it does offer a crutch for you in difficult times.
Albom, apparently, writes for many and has kept his words simple and direct.
But the same cannot be said about the message in the book.
Title: Have A Little Faith
Publisher: Hachette India
Price: Rs 250

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson: A Review

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

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

A Flawed God by Arjun Shekhar: A Review

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

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

Geek Nation by Angela Saini: A Review

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

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.)