A Field-Marshal Remembers : “A chit of a girl……..:

 

The year : 1996 . The month : December. The occasion : 16^th December, the 25^th Anniversary of the 1971 Indo-Pak War. The War in which India liberated East Pakistan, leading to the creation of Bangladesh, and the surrender of over 90,000 Pakistan soldiers.

The main participants of the war were still alive, and had gathered in Delhi to mark the silver jubilee of that memorable victory. Amongst them were Field Marshal Sam Maneckshaw, Gen JFR Jacob, Gen Jagjit Singh Aurora and many more legendary figures from the Army, Air Force and the Navy.

Ail India Radio was mounting a host of programmes to mark the occasion, and the presence of these actors of the war was seen to be an opportunity to interview them before they passed on the baton and retired from the world itself. My role was to stitch together a 30-minute documentary, along with veterans NB Nair and Jaswant Singh, using the soundbites from the interviews, which were being conducted by AIR News Services Talks Unit, and by the Delhi Station too.

Our Director General, Sahib Singh, was himself an army veteran, who had been recruited before the 1971 war, and had joined the Indian Information Service after retirement.

Our team, led by Mr. Sahib Singh reached the suite at the Oberoi where the Field Marshal was staying to interview him. When we rang the bell,  he opened the door himself, and beamingly shook hands with each one of us. He was tall, lean, very fair, with the famous handle-bar mustache, and dressed in a dark blue blazer.

While the equipment was being set up, he told us a story, the story of another interview, 25 years before, with the air of a skilled raconteur, to put us at ease.

“I am very nervous when I do interviews. I need to prepare myself”, said the man who had been the main architect of  the most convincing victory that India had won since Independence.

‘I learnt not to take the media lightly, in a very hard way. You see, a few weeks after the war ended, Times of India wanted to interview me. I agreed. “

“One fine morning, as I was shaving in my hotel room, the bell rang. I opened the door, still half-shaved, and there was this chit of a girl, very young really, who introduced herself as the Times reporter who’d interview me. I let her in, along with the photographer.”

“I requested her to wait on the sofa in my room, while I went back to complete my shave.”

“When I was in the bathroom, the girl called out to me, through the half-open door of the bathroom : General, after Independence, you could have to chosen to go and join the Pakistan army, you were given that choice.  Do you wonder what would have happened if you had done that?”

“Well, I was still shaving, and I gave a flippant and jovial answer, since the interview had not begun.”Well, my dear girl, I guess if I had done that, then Pakistan would have won the war!”

“I could hear her laughing at my answer, and then I came out of the bathroom, cleanly shaven, sat down, and did a long interview with her. I thought I had done it rather well, and she went away, along with the photographer, who took pics of me from a lot of angles”

“The next morning, I was woken up from sleep by a flurry of telephone calls.” “What have you said, Sam? Look at the Times of India” said family and friends. I grabbed a copy and, lo, the main headline on the front page of the newspaper read, “Pakistan would have won the war if I had led them – Gen Sam Maneckshaw”. I held my head in my hands. The one sentence that I thought was a joke, something off the record, had been faithfully copied down by the reporter, and  headlined by a canny editor at the venerable Lady of Boribunder, as TOI was called. The rest of what I had said in that long interview was overshadowed by that first paragraph.“

“All hell broke loose. Parliament was in session, and the opposition was baying for my blood, disrupting the Lok Sabha, and calling out “my intolerable arrogance”. “

“I got a call from the Prime Minister’s Office, asking me to come and meet Mrs. Indira Gandhi immediately. When I went to meet her, her eyes were blazing with anger, and she burst out : Sam, how could you have said that ?!!’

“I explained what had happened to her. She cooled down, though I don’t think she entirely believed me. But the legend of the arrogant Field Marshal was born that day”

“I realized, at a great cost, never to underestimate the media, even if it was a chit of a girl who represented it”

The entire episode was recited by the Field Marshal in a relaxed way, and with a twinkle in his eye, his polka-dot tie immaculately in place, seated on a rattan-work sofa in his suite.

Our Director General had kept quiet, engrossed at the story. He now spoke up : “Sir, do you remember you came to our mess just before the war, and gave us that inspiring speech ? I had just joined, and I had goose-pimples listening to you that day, and I remember that speech till today”

He had again become a cadet, in front of the legend, “Sam Bahadur”.

 

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My English Teacher : A life of community service....

One summer morning in 1980,  a small, dark, shy boy with a huge mop of hair was entrusted by his mother to Ms Edvina Fernandes , then the Class Teacher of the 8^th Standard in St. John The Evangelist, in Marol, Bombay. 

Though he had been in an English medium school before, it was the first time that  the boy was in a school where the teachers and the students actually spoke English, not Hindi, in class. He was petrified to speak, lest the others poke fun at him; he was at an age where it felt as if everything he did would be inadequate, comical, and not up to the standards.

Then in marched Edwina Ma’am. In every class, she took care to talk to the boy, praise him, and reassure him : she encouraged him to speak, to say what was in his mind, and she made it clear to the other boys that he was under her protection.

The boy blossomed under her, and the under-confidence, that sense of being inadequate left him; for the rest of his life, he saw himself as Edwina Ma’am encouraged him to think of himself. Namely, as bright, bold, brilliant, nay, audaciously brilliant. As part of an intellectual elite.

That boy was me, and those two years with Edwina Ma’am, as my class teacher, who taught me English, changed my life. From a weakling, I went on to become outspoken, confident, and, of course,  very good at English.

That year, we dashed down with  the cavalry of  Light Brigade, and  sailed the Aegean Sea, with Ullyses, and woke up at dawn with Abou Ben Adhem. We were at the Battle of Trafalgar, and we were at the Roundtable with King Arthur and his knights. Ma’am took us on each of  these journeys,  carefully prefacing each lesson with an entire period or two explaining the context of each poem and prose excerpt. The next year, Ma’am taught us Grammar from Wren & Martin, and drilled us day in and day out. The customary school pic taken that year is below : 

Indeed, to boys & girls from troubled backgrounds, she was a counsellor- gentle, firm, a figure of solid reassurance. She never had to raise her voice : she carried gravitas & kindness with her, and radiated peace. For 40 years, she served the community, drawing the humble pay of a schoolteacher, simply dressed and dedicated to the Church & Christ.

I left the school, and many years went by. I left Bombay (as it was called then), and some fifteen years later, made my way back to the school. She had been promoted to Vice-Principal by then, but her office was locked, as it was a holiday. I left a note at her door, saying simply : “ I am what I am because of you”. The note had my landline number.

Another decade and a half went by and she retired from the school. Ma’am’s mother passed away, and as she was sorting her papers in 2013,  she came across the note again. She had tried the number before, but recorded message had always said that the number did not exist anymore. This time, she tried MTNL’s changed number service. Hey presto, she had the new number.

On the eve of Diwali 2013, I picked up the phone, and a remarkably melodious and young voice said, can I talk to Narayanan??  I said, who is it?. And Ma’am replied, I am Edvina. I was stunned. Through the mists of time, some 32 years in fact, I was in touch with my teacher.

I did not know it then, but she was in the last stages of a losing battle with ovarian cancer. The cancer had spread, and chemotherapy was being tried, in big doses, in a futile attempt to hold back the tide. 

Edvina Ma'am had not got married, ànd her brother came down from USA to be with her.

Grateful students looked after her, took her to hospital, and ran errands. She was always puzzled, by her students's devotion : "I just did my duty and taught them to the best of my ability. I don't think there was anything special about my teaching"

Even though time was already running out on her, I am happy I was in touch with her, through weekly phone calls, in the last two years of her life.

When I finally met her in August 2015, 35 years after she taught me,  I prostrated myself in namaskar before her, my Guru, and she raised me, and blessed me, and made the sign of the Cross over me.

The cancer finally claimed her on 24th December, 2015, just 3 months later. Her beloved Christ had finally had mercy on her, a day before Christmas.

She has, indeed, gone to a better place. But she has left an imprint on me, like the way a mother does, on a son. Indeed, I am one of her sons today…..

The forgotten monuments of Bajirao Mastani...

          Out of the mists rising off the lake, the monument loomed : dark, huge, and imposing. It lay at the far end of a lake, impossibly far, and yet, incredibly, unmistakably, out of history, out of another time, another context. 

        The highway ran next to the lake, and for kilometers, you could see the monument, dominating the green countryside.

          The state government officials with me were not sure what it was : they consulted each other, and announced, "It's the Chattri (Cenotaph) of some king or the other" . These were local officials, those who belonged to the area. For them, the fact that the structure was the material fact and outcome of the friendship between two of the greatest heroes in Indian medieval history, was immaterial, and irrelevant.

        For, the cenotaph was built by the Maratha military genius, Peshwa Bajirao I in honour of his father-in-law, the equally famous Maharaja Chattrasal, the founder of the Bundelkhand State, which he carved out as the Mughal empire waned.  Chhattrasal, who was the father of the famous Mastani, the heroine of the historical Bollywood Bajirao Mastani, the daughter born of his marriage to a Persian lady.

        Grateful to Bajirao for coming to his help in 1728, when he was beseiged by Mughal forces led by Mohammed Khan Bangash, Chhattrasal is said to have given his daughter, Mastani, to him in marriage, and one-third of his kingdom (though there are dark mutterings that Bajirao would not leave without these prizes....well, these secularists -)). The story of Mastani is now encased in legend, and the romance between Bajirao and Mastani has come down to us, in both oral and written history.

       Well, when Chhattrasal passed away three years later, Bajirao constructed the huge cenotaph in his memory. Thus, one hero paid homage to another, and this medieval history has come down to us, nearly four centuries later.

     I finally made my way to the Cenotaph, to find it  in a bad condition, great slabs of masonry beginning to break off, bat-droppings everywhere, slip-shod repairs by civil contracters obliterating the original decorations. Sadly, I realized : though he is arguably the greatest hero Bundelkhand had produced in a thousand years, and founder of the Bundelkhand state, the state government and the district administration had neither the inclination, nor the money, nor the regard for Chhattrasal, to keep his cenotaph in good condition.

   The photos below do not show the true extent of the dilapidation, nor the fragile state of the Cenotaph, yet I am reproducing them, to show the magnificence of the structure.

Below is the octagonal raised platform at the center of the Cenotaph, where presumably, he would have been cremated, and a few more photos, including one of the author, to show the scale of the gates.

The octagonal platform at the center of the Cenotaph

A view of the Cenotaph from the side

The imposing gateway to the  tomb,
with the author in the foreground

Long-range shot of the Cenotaph

Another side view of the Cenotaph

Tomb of Chhatrasaal's Queen

The tomb of his Queen, located in almost as imposing a structure, is in a even worse condition : it looks totally forgotten and overgrown with algae and grasses.

Nearby, in Dhubela, where Maharaja Chattrasal's palace is located, is the museum, which is in a much better shape. Here, as a child, Mastani must have played, and grown up, in the harem, under Chattrasal's watchful eye, inculcating the virtue and loyalty for which she became famous as Bajirao's wife. 

When I went to the palace, I was the only person there, and the keeper of the palace/museum told me that visitors were rare there.

Therein lies the irony : millions of people in India and abroad would fork out money to see the film, with its plaster-of-paris monuments and palaces, and the actual palaces, and tombs, and the forts of the real people who were in the story are neglected, falling to pieces, and will be lost, for the lack of money, and interest, and respect for our past.Bollywood would live, and Bundelkhand's heritage perish....

Yet, the architecture would live on : Lutyens and Baker, when they built the magnificent edifices that adorn modern New Delhi, would remember the great architecture of Bundelkhand, and incorporate it in North Block and South Block, paying tribute to the great architectural traditions of India. India's own architects, meanwhile, would turn their back to this great tradition of architecture, and build steel-and-glass buildings straight out of Rotterdam - the same attitude which leaves them indifferent to Chattrasal's Cenotaph and other centuries-old buildings rotting away in the rain and heat.

         

Random reflections on Gujarat...

After a long while, i was in Gujarat again last week, and besides Baroda and Ahmedabad, i also went to Patan and Mount Abu. As my train came into Ahmedabad, i saw the familiar landmarks outside major India cities: large piles of garbage, kilometres of it, from my train window. Looks like an area untouched by Swacch Bharat, I mused....
I left from Baroda railway station, and it seemed cleaner than most Indian railway stations. However, what struck me was the extent to which all signboards were in Gujarati.
On the one hand, the state wants to promote itself as major tourist destination, and on the other hand, even numerals were in Gujarati in all the signboards/milestones!

The dhokla was as good as ever, and the sculptures at the Sun Temple at Modhera, Rani Ki Vav, and Dilwara temple were mindblowing : only the sculptures at the Chennakesava temple at Halebedu are more exquisite than this...!!

The jargon of american politics....

Guess every country has a jargon of its own, developed to deal with its own political institutions and the situations that arise from them, even if superficially, they are all writing in English- USA, or India, or Britain.

In 2000, the US jargon for a presidential race that was nailbitingly narrow was "too close to call".

Most Indians had never heard the phrase, and even less had even the faintest idea of what it meant; "to call", meant, for us, to call someone on phone!!!

Fascinatingly, as the US heads for another close elections, new phraseology is tumbling out of the US media.

'Minnesota and Nebraska have come into play" : which means that they are now being taken, by one side or other, or both, as swing states, after having been seen as solidly Republican or Democratic all this while.

'Obama and his surrogates have flown to Ohio" : surrogates means those who represent the candidates, and are in  a sense, an extension of the canddiate, such as Michelle Obama or Bill Clinton.

"spin rooms"- where the candidates' political and publicity managers interpret and try to put their candidates in a positive light, especially after a debate

'endorsement"- wherein a newspaper or politician endorses a candidate's views, and asks the electorate to vote for him.

And many, many, more, which are intelligible only to Americans.

Just like, "booth-capturing', 'defection", 'vote-bank", "tent-wallah", etc are unique to Indian's politics!!

The Shibboleths of American Politics....

The Wikipedia (the only dictionary and encyclopedia in vogue these days!!) defines a shibboleths thus:
"A shibboleth (/ˈʃɪbəlɛθ/^[1] or /ˈʃɪbələθ/)^[2] is a word, sound, or custom that a person unfamiliar with its significance may not pronounce or perform correctly relative to those who are familiar with it. It is used to identify foreigners or those who do not belong to a particular class or group of people. It also refers to features of language, and particularly to a word or phrase whose pronunciation identifies a speaker as belonging to a particular group."

Like so many other Indians, I have been watching the run-up to the Presidential elections in the United States, and it is fascinating to look at it, especially from the viewpoint of an outsider. Nikita Khrushchev (as did, indeed, the entire Communist movement) had a simple view about this whole thing, when asked whether, the debates, the advertisements, the primaries, the caucuses did not really prove that the USA is the most democratic country in the world, with the fairest election processes: Khrushchev claimed that well, the whole discourse was conducted within some narrow doctrinal parameters, which were never questioned by either of the candidates, and that what looked to everybody like two alternate approaches was just the sparring between two elites for control of the state. In other words, the US system did not allow truly divergent or new views to emerge.

I rejected the Communist/Soviet view of the US elections a quarter century ago, but now, as I grow older, I am struck by the correctness of that description.

Each Party, and its candidate have some views, which is neither questioned by their own people, or even by their opponents. Even more, both parties have identical views on these topics, even if nobody else outside the US accept it.

Some examples:

1) Both parties spar over how close Iran is, to building a nuclear weapon, and how to put an end to it. No one, not a politician, not a single TV/Internet columnist even asks, do we have a right to stop the programme, even Iran is really building one? In the rest of the world, or atleast the developing world, in India or Iran, the debate would be larger, and  the first question that would be asked, would be, what right do countries which themselves have had atomic weapons for 60 years, to stop others? Not only that, but also, if Israel can have weapons, why not their opponents? Like Khrushchev predicted, the debate never addresses the larger issues of disarmament or even-handedness in dealings in the Middle-east. It is a shibboleth: only some countries can be allowed nuclear weapons.

2) Not in a single debate or in any video clipping or news article have I come across a figure for what percent of GDP the US fiscal deficit is. In any other part of the world, countries would be judged on their deficit using this tool, as also whether they are falling into a debt trap because of excessive borrowing. The most basic of economic textbooks always make this distinction: borrowing may be bad for an individual, but not necessarily so for nations. Since a large part of the US electorate thinks  that government borrowing is "morally" wrong, this is another shibboleth that cannot be demolished. Unlike what both parties think, in the rest of the world, the view is simple: you can neither tax your way out of a depression, nor cut spending: it will only make a recession worse. A country's borrowing can be said to wrong, in economic terms, only if the debt servicing takes up a unacceptably large portion of its expenditure. I am yet to come across figures indicating that such a scenario has come about, and yet, this is a shibboleth, which neither parties question: the deficit is bad, and we have to have "balanced' budgets...

3) 'Shipping" jobs out: the reason the standard of living in the USA is so high is because of free trade, which has led to cheap goods from across the world landing up in the US,  at prices which are low because of  the cheap labor costs abroad. If Americans would carry out manufacturing at home, sure, unemployment would go down, but then the costs would rise, and the US would become a high-cost economy, like the European Union, and unable to compete in export markets across the world, like the Europeans. It would probably make more economic sense to just continue to import workers, and goods, and have a high standard of living, and pay out unemployment allowances, than have a inflationary, uncompetitive economy, but, again, this is a shibboleth, and China and India are the bad boys....

And a thousand other shibboleths, on abortion, on foriegn policy, on taxes, on the military,...any of which would be debated, if only by a fringe party in the Westminster-style democracies, but not here, in the world's 'greatest democracy"....

And, funnily enough, the last shibboleth: that the presidential system, with the executive being closely tied to legislative sanction, which has deadlocked the US in a deadly class warfare, is the best...in any other country, overhauling a system put in place 230 years ago would have been an election issue....not here, though!! In other words, whether the Republicans win or the Democrats do, it will have little effect, as the other party would ensure that none of their agenda is implemented, by controlling either the House of Representatives or the Senate, or both.

Sitting in the sunny and benign autum of Delhi, reading both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post on my Ipad, and watching the campaign on Fox and CNN,  I feel as though I  am watching gold-fish in a bowl, interminably circling each other, unaware of the large world outside their bowl....fascinating....America has perfected the art of navel-gazing!!!

The New Age Woman?

Today, after 17 years of tying rakhis to cousins, friends, sundry relatives, my daughter simply refused to tie any rakhis to anyone: her reason: she did not need any "protection" from anyone, and that she could take care of herself. More pertinently, she did not like the attitude of weakness it conveyed. So her puzzled cousins met her, paid her the "fees" for tying the rakhi, even though she did not tie one, and she sat there, a principled objector to tradition. Guess it reflects the 21st century woman: one who sees her male peers as not only equals, but also finds it difficult to accept societal conventions which imply  inequality. May her tribe increase!

The true life of villagers living in Sanctuaries...

I'm just back from a trek to the Govind Wildlife Sanctuary in Uttaranchal, and it has caused me to question my longheld beliefs about Sanctuaries, and about Government policies towards those villagers who live in them.
Govind Pashu Vihar is a 995 square kilometer sanctuary for snow-leopards, musk deer, civet etc etc, and I trekked through three villages- Sankhri, Taluka and Seema.
The villages had no power, no running water and no electricity. There was no mobile or landline connectivity. And ofcourse, no roads. And no fuel, except firewood.
 All this, because the forest department does not allow roads, or power pylons, or water pipes in a forest reserve.
To talk to each other or the outside world, villagers have to walk for days, to Purola, the nearest town.
With basic amenities absent, the other signs of civilization, too were absent, such as medical care.
Wherever I went, i was approached by villagers asking for medicine for fever, or stomach-ache, or diaarhoea.
There is no employment, and the villagers have, the locals say, taken to poaching and illegal collection of rare Himalayan herbs to supplement the income they get from their meager fields.
The villagers have reportedly been offered land outside the sanctuary, near Dehra Dun, but they have declined, as they feel it is too less.
Prices are stratospheric: Maggie costs 40 rupees a pack, and without roads, a porter takes 400 rupees a day to transport anything to anyplace.
All these days, I supported the classic government policy : no development inside Sanctuaries, and allow the villagers to stay inside, as they have for centuries, with the rights to collect forest produce.

But now, after the seeing the blighted lives of the villagers, my views have undergone a change: do not build roads, or allow electricity, or have water pipes, but do relocate them. Forcibly, if required.
However, whatever happens, let there cellphone connectivity in the sanctuary: this is the 21st century. Solar panels are used to recharge phones in the villages, and the  phones are used as torches and for playing songs. The panel below cost 2500 rupees:

Imagine catching water from a stream, and then picking up firewood, and then tending a fire to cook the food, and then walking for hours to talk to someone, and then as darkness draws near, lighting a lantern for light: and all this, just 500 kilometers from Delhi as the crows flies, in the 21st century. Sounds romantic? Try doing it for a lifetime.....

April musings...

Its been a wonderful april for Delhi: whenever the temperature started climbing, or anyway on most days when it did, the sky clouded over, cool winds came in, and it drizzled. In other words, magic weather for those of us who endure the terrible heat of Delhi.


So, what with the brilliant sunshine, and the breezy weather, here are a few breezy musings, written in the style of the much lamented satirist Behram Contractor, India's answer to Art Buchwald, who used in write in Bombay's (yes, Bombay) Midday:


Like, this summer, there is going to be no power cut in Delhi, because i'm sure, what with the elections just a few months away, Sheila Dixit would have ordered the Electricity companies to buy power at whatever the cost, and supply it to Delhiites. Nothing loses you votes faster than the electorate sweating it out in the Delhi heat, unable to sleep because of the mosquitoes.


Like, I mused, does Amitabh Bachan really tweet and blog to the extent he does? If it is being ghost-written for him, well, all I can say is that the tweets are so typical of Amitabh that this ghost writer must be the best one in the world...


Like, what with all these convictions for corruption, you would expect government offices and officers to become more law-abiding, but somehow, it never seems to happen...


Like, cellphone companies are getting away with murder, overcharging their customers in a variety of ways. If you dont fall in line, hey presto, your outgoing calls are barred. So, just get a dual sim phone, like I got this April: that way, you will never be at their mercy again.

Like, whatever happened to armchairs? cant find one anywhere in south delhi. One shopkeeper told me nobody buys em anymore because there is no space in anyone's home for them. Interesting. But I wonder: does anyone nowadays truly, truly retire, and put their feet up, and lean back on their armchairs?

Like, I used to wonder why pretty girls in Wodehouse's novels were called April. Now I know: if April can be this beautiful, why not name your girls April? It must have been dazzlingly beautiful in the Riviera in April, where Wodehouse lived....

The Best Little Library in Delhi

Imagine reading the latest books at just 10 percent of the cover price.
And best of all, not having to store those books in your space-starved home for the next 50 years, and religiously dusting them in dusty Delhi everyday. That's what you can do with the best little library in Delhi, called Eloor Library, tucked away in a basement in South Extension.

Delhi,for all its boasting about its restaurants, its art galleries, its museums,has little to boast about when it comes to libraries.
Especially what are called, in towns and cities across India, as "lending libraries":libraries, which for a small sum of money, and refundable deposit, let you read books.
After years, nay, decades of searching, I finally found Eloor.
It is packed with the latest bestsellers, and the books are brand new, and the air-conditioning is superb, and boy, can you get the typical fragrance of the newly printed page there..
All you have to do is deposit 1,000 rupees, borrow books upto that amount, for a rent of ten percent of the book, and keep the book for two weeks. Or if you want to borrow more books, deposit 2,000, and borrow upto that amount. And if you want to keep the book longer, pay a rent of one percent of the book per day.
What's more, you can suggest books you would like the library to buy, and they will get them for you, and phone you up and inform you that the book has come...
Ah, the excitement of hunting for a book, rather than the tame act of buying it off a bookshop!!
I have been carrying the visiting cards of Eloor, and giving hundreds of them away, stiff with worry that they will close shop if they do not attract a big enough clientele.
You can see what they're all about at: www.eloorlibraries.in
The Address: D-31,South Extension-1, Delhi 110049.
Telephone:24626122.
Landmark: Its in a lane which is three lanes away, parallel and behind South Ex Part 1 market.
Am I unashamedly plugging some chappie's stuff?? Yes, I am. Coz this will change your life!!
P.S : Eloor closed its doors in Delhi in 2014, due to lack of profitability. They invited their customers to come and pick up books to the extent of their deposits, and clients sadly did so. I believe Eloor continues to function in other cities, like Chennai, where rents are lower, and citizens read.

Delhi, and quakes...

In 2001, when the earthquake hit the Kutch, and killed 1,00,000 people, I was there for ten days, covering it for AIR.
People had been pole-axed by falling walls and columns in the very act of fleeing, and rigor mortis had set in their limbs, freezing the terror on their faces.
In one street in a Patel village, hundreds of corpses lay that way, each frozen in its own attitude, and I remembered the Mahabharata's description of the end of Dwarka, with the earthquake devastating the town, and sea rushing in...
Over 100 aftershocks hit the place in the succeeding two weeks.
In the last 11 years, in Delhi, there have been atleast half a dozen bad shocks, and it brings a sense of deja vu...
Last week, I had called in a couple of officers working with me, and we were having an accounts meeting, when my room on the fifth floor of my building started to heave.
The table shook from side to side, but both the people with me seemed to blissfully unaware of what was happening. Strangely, it seemed stupid to run out, or hide under a table as prescribed by our earthquake drill-master.
The people with me did not look too scared, but I was, having visions of building collapse.
If there is a even a fairly strong quake in Delhi, millions will die, as most of the buildings have been built without the ability to withstand quakes.
But then, life is cheap for us, right?
The town of Anjar lost some 10,000 people in the 2001 quake. When I went to Anjar, I found a memorial there, in memory of the five hundred people who had perished in 1956!! And the memorial had been inaugurated by Nehru. However, Anjar blissfully continued to build without an earthquake-resistant building code, and paid the price half a century later.
Delhi, too, will pay the price one day for this stupidity.
Let's hope it does not happen in our lifetimes...

National Highways or racing tracks for the rich?

Last week, I drove all the way from Chennai to Kanyakumari,a distance of around 800 kilometers. I was on NH 45 till Madurai, and then NH 7 from Madurai to Kanyakumari. The highways were fantastic, and almost deserted. The high toll had driven the traffic off these newly built roads, onto the State Highways. The tolls were around between 40 to around 70 rupees, and an average of around 1 rupee per kilometer. So for my 1600 kilometers from Chennai to Kanyakumari and back, I must have spent around 1,700 rupees in tolls, enough to deter most of the people in Tamil Nadu, who would not be able to spend that much.
It was a pity to see the road, smooth, four laned, with a central divider strip planted with flowering bushes, so deserted.
The state highways were like they always were, narrow, with two lanes, huge potholes, and deadly traffic.
I and my father had a week-long debate on whether the government was correct in confining the newly built National Highways to the well-off, as we drove down and came up from Kanyakumari.
My Master's Degree in Public Policy had equipped with some tools to analyse this situation, but they failed in the face of my father's simple statement that it was morally wrong to keep the masses off such roads.
The theory says that roads are public goods, and that the State should step in provide such goods when any private person or entity finds it too expensive to provide the good, since the benefits, or "externalities" of public goods are such that a huge number of people are benefited.
In other words, by having great roads, the benefits, ranging from cheaper fuel consumption, to lower transport charges, easier access to schools and hospitals, are so high that it should be paid for by the State, since a private individual would find it difficult to collect the charges for such goods.
But here was a situation in which a clearly public good had been given to the private sector, who had provided the good, but at such high prices that there were very little benefits, or benefits only to a very few well-off people. In other words, fuel consumption would be high because most of the traffic stuck to the state highways, or access and duration of travel would continue be as painful, as most of the people would continue on the old roads...
The argument, that the State was forced to ask private companies to build these "build-operate-transfer" highways, because it did not have funds, is debatable: the private companies, too, raised funds from banks and the capital market, and there was no reason why National Highways Authority of India could not have raised the funds.
I finally had to agree with my father: it was crony capitalism at its worst. The roads were being operated by shady companies who had bribed politicians, or were actually front companies for politicians, and they were asked to toll people and build these roads (the politician took his cut and outsourced it to the actual contractor) in preference to NHAI itself collecting the tolls and building the roads, because such "sweetheart" deals are what are the bread-and-butter of India's political class today.
So the multi-billion rupee highways are now basically racing tracks for the rich, where they tear down at 150 kmph on their Toyota Fortuners and Hyundai Accents....
Sad.

whatever happened to???

Guess one of the things about growing old is that, more and more, you start asking, whatever happened to...??

Like, I wondered the other day, whatever happened to Rajesh Khanna? I know he's alive somewhere, but why is there no mention of him, no pics of him in the media or any other place?

Whatever happened to transistors? I used to see people, atleast workers, carrying them around a few years back, but all i see now are car radios, and people listening to radio on their mobiles. Guess the transistor, with its extendable antenna is now history...

Or, whatever happened to music videos? I remember it was mandatory to release the video with every new rock or pop song, but i dont get to see them any longer...all i see on TV is the Michael Jackson/Lionel Ritchie stuff, or Enrique Inglesias' old videos...do they release them anymore, i wonder?

And, whatever happened to those weekly music countdowns? everybody, whether BBC Radio or MTV or V used to have them, and it was a nice, comfortable way of knowing what's on..but all I can see now are reality shows on MTV...

And, whatever happened to "stickers"? As a kid, in school, we used to crowd around any kid who brought a big Richie Rich sticker to school, and our dreams at night were of stickers. The kids now could not care less about stickers, and i do not see them any where...

Or, does any kid collect anything anymore? We used to collect stamps, or cigarrette cases, or marbles, or coins, or matchboxes. Every kid was supposed to have a 'hobby", usually something to do with collecting : when you got to know a kid, you would ask him his name, and then his "hobby". I remember my daughter collecting Barbies, and then "Tazos", shiny discs that came with chips. Wonder any kid has time to collect anything now, what with the SMSing, the Facebooking, the tuitions and the TV.

Guess our parents would have a hell of a lot of 'whatever happened to....??" cropping up everyday, and that, more than anything else, binds them together, this growing old with the memories of an era which has gone by....

The Sense of An Ending...a review of this year's Booker Prize winner..

My 77-year old father, a diabetic, gets up in the middle of the night to go to the loo, as is the case for most diabetics. There, in the middle of the night, a memory of what he did or said 50 years back strikes him, and he feels the pangs of remorse. A remorse so painful that he finds it difficult to go back to sleep. A remorse for which no atonement is possible, for the person towards whom he feels it is dead.
Guilt and remorse is the subject of Julian Barnes' " The Sense of an Ending", and it would be difficult to find a subject more relevant and immediate, because every decent human being has, sometime or the other, felt them.
The slim, 150-page novel is an interesting read, but nowhere reaches the brilliance of an Ian McEwan's "Enduring Love" or Ishiguro's "Remains of the Day", or Golding's "Lord of the Flies", all of them equally compact novels.
Barnes' poses interesting question for those of us who keep looking back at the past: Is what happened in the past really the same as our memories of our past? And what happens, when, by some miracle, you come across a document which shows that you acted much worse than you now remember doing? Is it possible to expatiate for your sins ? Does your expatiation make a difference to the object of your remorse ?
Unfortunately, despite raising these profound questions, Barnes remains unable to solve them. Till today, the final plot is incomprehensible to me. One of the reviewers has commented that one has to look at the novel, from the view point of the last-twist-in-the-end stories, pioneered by Saki, that brilliant short-story writer. Well, all I can say, that Saki's twist in the end is atleast comprehensible..
Anyhow, the book has a lot of quotable quotes, like this one: "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation"...which, if, applied to the Indian context, has historians who are certain that Akbar was secular, since those who were wiped at Chittor have left no memories, and the documentation at hand does not tell us much about Akbar's motives for massacring 50,000 inhabitants, including women and children, in cold blood.
My father? This book is not for him, since his eyesight is so poor that he cannot read, and the object of his remorse, unlike the protagonist's ex-girlfriend, is dead and gone, three decades back.For him will be the remorse, like acid, biting deeply into his soul, making him sadder and sadder till he is liberated by Death...

Death of Dev Anand..

Guess when someone dies, we Indians are so civil that we only say good things about him.
So was the case when Dev Anand died.
Yes, the songs were great.
Yes, the magic was fantastic.
Yes, he had a very positive attitude to work.
And, was he handsome.
Now, since no-one else seems to be saying anything else except eulogise him (the TV stories on him were shallow, mere packages of his interviews and those lilting songs by Rafi put together), I suppose it shall fall to me to say some harsh things.
Poor chap, he did not know how to age gracefully.
Till the last day, the wig stayed in place (the wig was too large for his shrunken face), the zany military style jackets in bright colours continued, and so did the mufflers, even in summer.
And he loved the limelight so much that he absolutely had to be the central character in every film, even the romantic lead in them, even when there were younger actors around, people like Aamir Khan. In "Awwal Number", he cast a newly-risen Aamir Khan as a cameo, while he was the main lead, at 70!!
So he became a ludicrous figure, a figure to be ridiculed.
He did not grow as an actor, say like the way Sean Connery or Clint Eastwood did (one has to just watch "Million-dollar Baby"- a repudiation of all violence, directed and acted by Clint) and ended up doing films which very mediocre, and which bombed without a trace at the box-office.
He could have retired gracefully, like Shammi Kapoor, and accepted the physicality of aging: the baldness, the greyness, again like Shammi kapoor, but he chose to go the MGR way : MGR hid the bags under his eyes with dark glasses, and his loss of hair with a astonishing Fez hat in the humid heat of Chennai.
But for all that, i confess, i, too, am a fan of the magic his songs created.
I remember a childhoold spent in front of a neighour's black and white TV, watching him in Chitrahaar and Sunday Doordarshan films, wanting badly to be like him.
If only Indian news TV had an intelligent obituary, and had a panel discussion, dissecting the magic that Dev Anand created, with Kishore, Rafi, Suraiya, Sadhna and many others...
If he lies in state here, in Delhi, I would bunk office to stand in queue, to pay my homage to the ultimate romantic hero....

A star-struck society..

I attended the Ad-Asia Conference in Delhi on Tuesday, and I was surprised to find that the inaugural was by Shah Rukh Khan, along with Ambika Soni.
Suprised because, well, if Ad-asia had invited whoever had publicized Ra-One I would have understood the point; inviting SRK seemed as stupid to me as it would be if Aishwarya Rai was invited to speak at the Gynaecologist Annual Conference just because she is going to have a baby.
Well, I planned to miss the inaugural (no way i would be caught dead listening to a politican and a bollywood hero, and receiving gyan from them)..

Despite my best efforts, i landed up towards the end of the inaugural, and watched the tamasha from a side room: the main room was totally jampacked, and they were showing it on the CC TV.

Shah Rukh, not knowing anything much to speak about, just kept poking fun at himself, and kept the audience in splits. He then said, guys, the biggest job in India is keeping the Shah Rukh Khan brand going, and then again wandered off into his jokes. Finally, he started to dance to his chamak challo number, in desperation. Even that, he could not manage, as the music kept stopping. By now, he was drenched in sweat (imagine me going to CERN in geneva and giving a lecture on Plasma physics), and mercifully the inaugural ended.

I wondered why we are so star-struck that, to a sober professional thing such as Ad Asia, we need to bring in a bollywood star. Would the Americans bring in Al Pacino to inaugurate the Harvard Law School Seminar on Law-making in the twenty-first century? Or is it to give "value" to those who
shelled out 40,000 bucks for the three-day event?

Guess if they really, really, want to do things seriously, they need to get the right people, have multiple sessions on in smaller, different rooms,and think more in terms of solid value than be star-struck fans...

Jagjit singh kahan chale gaye..

A couple of days back, I went to Siri Fort Auditorium, to attend a tribute by Ghulam Ali for Jagjit Singh. Almost immediately I regretted it..
The guards kept the mostly elderly audience waiting outside on the street in a long queue for an hour, and then let them all in a rush, through a narrow entrance. As people kept patiently waiting, various "VIPs" and interlopers were let in through another gate.
Finally when people went in, they found another queue, this time to enter the auditorium. Not surprisingly, tempers went up, and the mood of an evening of ghazals was spoiled.
When the "tribute" started, it started not with Ghulam Ali, but with some unknown singer, who proceeded to bore the pants off the audience till he was almost booed off the stage by the audience.
Finally Ghulam Ali made an entrance, some two hours after 6.30 pm, and all the VIPs made a beeline to the stage, to "pay" their floral and aural tributes to jagjit singh. They droned on and on, and one busybody in a black suit actually went up to the stage three times to offer flowers to a portrait of jagjit singh. This busybody (apparently CEO or something of the company which was "sponsoring" the evening) then launched into a lengthy narration about some incident with Jagjit Singh, till finally the audience started slow-clapping to show its annoyance.
Finally Ghulam Ali began, and though he sang beautifully, he sang classical ghazals, not the "filmi" ghazals which i was expecting, in a evening billed as a tribute to Jagjit Singh.
So, regretfully, I withdrew, reflecting that the evening would have been spent more fruitfully listening to Talat Mehmood on the You Tube...I guess that though Classical ghazals may be more Ghulam Ali's ouevre, if he wants a younger audience, as he seemed keen to have, then he would have to sing less obscure ones first...

Paid News, or the sad mechanics of money

Thanks to producer Umesh Aggarwal's persistent invitation,last wednesday found me at the IIC, to watch a documentary directed by him, titled "Paid News". The hall was packed, and after the film was shown, there was a lively debate. The film was interesting, though it cannot be shown on any channel or any theater, because it bluntly named individuals, such as Burkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi, and therefore is subject to defamation laws.
However, what struck me was the panel discussion, which had the Chairperson of Prasar Bharti, Mrinal Pande, pontificating on the ills which ail the private channels and newspapers, while being entirely silent about how the government is gagging Prasar Bharati from doing a honest and fair reporting of stories in AIR and DD News. To add to this, a few gasbags had tagged along from Doordarshan, who heaped even more abuse on private media, while being entirely unashamed of how they had blacked out Anna Hazare.
Even more curiouser, was that the Director did not say a single word about his own film, even when invited to do so, while Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, who emerges as the Knight In Shining Armour in the film, seated himself in the back of the audience, and refused to say a single word.
Were they scared? Or simply self-effacing individuals? Nope.
They and their film had boxed itself into a position where they were the accusers, the judge, and also the jury...so, basically, they were hiding behind the panel, not really wanting to reply to the audience....

Missing out on the sunlight, and hugging the shadows?

I just finished reading the much acclaimed "Last Man in Tower" by Arvind Adiga.
The book is about an old man, who refuses to sell  his flat in a "co-operative Housing Society" in Bombay, to a builder, while all the others in the building want to sell and cash out. The builder is giving each owner 250 percent of the market value of the flat, and because of the stubborn old man, the others are in danger of missing out on the bonanza. Relations deteriorate, and the residents start making life hell for the old man, to pressurise him to sell out. He is betrayed and shunned by everybody, including his own son.
Like William Golding's "Lord of the flies", the book is a study of human nature can be corrupted by power, and money.
It is grim, gloomy book, and as a morality lesson, it's a great read.
However, luckily, real life is not as bad as the book makes out, in a co-operative housing society.
I have been going to visit my grandmother in one such typical Housing Society in Mulund in Bombay since 1977. I have stayed there for months at a time as a schoolboy, during my holidays, and at one time, every single one of the 16 owners in the building was known to me.
The children who were there in 1977 grew up, got married, and moved out. Many of the boys married girls from neighbouring buildings, after romancing them for years. Over the years, retirement and death, have taken their toll: very few of the original members of the society are left, and those who purchased the flats have sold it to the next buyer, who in turn has sold it to the next buyer...
Basically, except for a golden period of around 20 years, from 1977 to 1997, the building, as such did not have a feeling of a "community".  For  twenty years there was this feeling, people cared about each other's children, rejoiced at each other's happiness, attended the marriages in each other's families, and ofcourse, gossiped. Each flat knew the familiar milestones of prosperity of the other flat: when the TV came, when the phone came, when the refrigerator was purchased...
There used be a diwali party, a christmas party, and a new year party, all based on contributions, with bhelpuri, sandwiches, and lemonade.
It was an incredibly satisfying feeling of community, and that is precisely not what is captured in Arvind Adiga's book.
He is concentrating on what can happen if there is a trigger which leads to the breakdown of community relations, and the residents gang up against one of themselves due to greed.
In other words, in his eagerness to narrate an allegory, he forgets the main story: the institution called the Co-perative Housing Society, and how it improved the sociological milieu of middle-class Bombay, and how many of us still feel nostalgic and long for the "mohalla" feel of the Society.
Poor Adiga, he has missed out on the sunlight, and is feeding off the shadows...

The hope of the future...

I was in India Gate last night, at the Rally to celebrate Anna's "victory", and it was electrifying.
As I waded in through dancing youngsters, and fullfledged steel bands, and swishing tricolours, and candle-light wielding aunties, I was happy to see that almost the entire crowd was under 25. I seemed to be one of the few people with grey in my hair...
It is a good experience taking part in an agitation for improving and reforming things, and it is a character forming trait.
It was also astonishing to see youth crying out frienziedly slogans praising a 74 year old man,Anna Hazare, and not Rahul Gandhi or any of the other "youth" icons. It shows to what extent these people have become discredited in the eyes of the young.
Though I went to the Victory Rally, I do not believe the victory has been achieved.
I will believe in victory when I actually see the politicians and the IAS actually putting themselves under a Lokpal who can investigate their crimes and punish them for it. Between fobbing off an old man with a scrap of paper, and actually passing a tough law are light years of dodging and deception.
I believe Anna finally gave in, because he did not, in the end, have the guts to carry out his threat to fast unto death if a bill was not passed by the thirtieth of august.
I have seen the same Lok Sabha pass a Constitution Amendment bill for ensuring reservation in promotions in a flat two days, and I believe that the politicos got away, dodging the enormous pressure, by trotting out lame excuses.
I remember Ajit Jogi, as Congress spokesman, once telling us journalists in an off the record briefing that, the Seshan Experience had taught them to never empower and insulate a bureacrat to such an extent that he could  turn rogue, and endanger the very politicians who had elevated him.
Well, guess this House would never repeat that mistake. It would take us years to vote out these thieves and bring honest people who will bring a genuine Lok Pal bill, which could make a difference.
But tonight, I believe it would eventually happen, given the anger and enthusiasm of the youth.
PS:Even as other channels were doing live programming all day about the agitation, Doordarshan News was tonight discussing PM's forthcoming visit to Bangladesh. Guess apart from cretinous anchors, timid editors, and castrated senior officials, the experts who come in to their studios need to have their heads examined....