Wednesday, August 18, 2010

BookReview: The Great Indian Novel -- Shashi Tharoor

This is both how a book review should NOT be written and glimpses into the genius of a man.He might have twittered away his ministry but I do have a faith that he will rebound, true to his St. Stephen Campaigning Slogan "Shashi Tharoor, Jeetega Jaroor"!

He dedicates the book to his two sons and one "Tilottama", arguably his first wife. I hope I could do somehting similar for my own pretty Bimbo. But let me tell you Bimmo, it shakes me with shivers thinking that a man as witty and wise as Mr. Tharoor who writes so emphatically of Indian culture, it's diversity and its ability to hold the opposites, couldn't save his first marriage.And that despite his two sons. And no one can blame me poking my nose in authors' personal life because once in him I had begun to find a person I would like to become.

During 2006 PAN-IIT global alumni meet after his speech which was more a reproduction of his writings from his 1997 book he was abandoned to a corner. IITians at such meets do cocoon themselves gloating mostly on self praise if not in never ending nostalgia. It took me almost half an hour to shake myself from disbelief and awe to walk upto him, to word my muddled thoughts into few straight questions of which later I could ask none.I could just compliment him on his masterpiece. He smiled and signed a piece of paper advising me to read more. I have misplaced that piece of paper now but I am sure to meet him sometime again... after I have read more..:))

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


“They tell me India is an underdeveloped country. They attend seminars, appear on television, even come to see me, creasing their high hundred rupee suits and clutching their moulded plastic briefcases, to announce in tones of infinite understanding that India has yet to develop. Stuff and nonsense of course. These are the kind of fellows who couldn’t tell their kundalini from a decomposing earthworm, and I don’t hesitate to tell them so. I tell them they have no knowledge of history and even less of their own heritage.I tell them that if they would only read the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, study the golden age of the Mauryas and the Guptas and even of those Muslim chaps the Mughals, they would realize that India is not an underdeveloped country but a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay.”(First Book,1)

This is how Shashi Tharoor begins his ‘The Great Indian Novel’. He begins by not only attacking the popular perception of India as underdeveloped country but also traces its roots in the ignorance of the populace about their own roots. Not surprisingly, in the subsequent pages which serve as eclectic mixture of messages he marries two histories – a real and a mythical -- to hatch his story. His characters whose origins bear more resemblance to the first century epic Mahabharat, live in the times and represent leaders more identifiable with the last century. It must have been an arduous task to spin a story seeing metaphors stitching two patches separated two thousand years away. But surprisingly, he does it very well and provokes one to look with a new perspective at a new nation muddling through present into future with its ethos inscribed in age old tales told and retold a countless times in countless ways.

Traditionally, the age old tale of Mahabharat is ascribed to Maha Rishi Ved Vyas who is said to have narrated the epic to Lord Ganesh of Hindu mythology. In Tharoor’s novel we have an omnipresent narrator named VVji who employs an elephantine scribe Ganapathi. Ganapathi, under a contract has to understand each word before writing and hence he is the first person to listen and absorb the twice-born tale from VVji. And VVji when he sets out to straighten Ganapathi’s ‘frowns on crown’ and ‘furrows on brows’ after a reckless bout of humor or after picking few of history’s rumors is actually communicating in the first person with the reader. This narrative structure not only draws reader into the story but also helps author to be tactfully didactic without boring his readers.

“How, you may well ask, and I shall tell you. But not just yet, my impatient amanuensis. As the Bengalis say when offered cod, we still have other fish to fry.”(Second Book,12)

“How shall I tell it, Ganpathi? It is such a long story, an epic in itself, and we have so much else to describe. Shall I tell of the strange weapon of disobedience, which Ganga, with all his experience of insisting upon obedience and obtaining it towards himself, developed into an arm of moral war against the foreigner?” ( Second Book,11)


Gangaji or Ganga Datta is the most dominant character of the novel. Like Bhisma of Mahabharat he renounces the throne and vows celibacy but still he is at the centre of the politics and most concerned with the procreation of progeny that populates the story. Gangaji later grows into a spiritual leader just as pale and bald as Gandhiji. While Tharoor humors Gangaji’s unusual ways of preparing his own enema and cleaning his own toilet he also admires at length the unusual results yielded by his unusual resolve in his unusual philosophy.


“That is where Ganga spoke for the genius of a nation; we Indians have a great talent for deriving positives from negatives. Non-violence, non-cooperation, non-alignment, all mean more, than the concepts they negate.” (Second Book, 11)

Tharoor successfully sketches the Gandhian philosophy in his renderings of Mahatma’s movements against British for rural indigo-farmers of Motihari and suburban jute-factory workers of Budge Budge in two chapters aptly titled ‘The Duel With the Crown’ and ‘The Powers of Silence’. Gandhiji’s call to follow the dictates of conscience rather the laws of British and to except punishment silently to prove the strength of ones convictions are further illustrated in a hilarious satire in chapter ‘Forbidden Fruit” where ‘The Mango March’ mimics ‘The Dandi March’.

The chapter titles of the novel also bear resemblance to many English writings on India. With titles like ‘Passages Through India’, ‘The Bungle Book’, ‘The Duel With the Crown’, ‘Midnight's Parents’ and ‘The Far Power-Villain’ Tharoor refers to many writers like Forster, Kipling, Paul Scott, Salman Rushdie and M.M. Kaye. Letting loose a rein of cheerful irreverence he also litters his prose with poetry. Particularly for Pandu he writes his longest poem detailing his days before his death caused arguably by a plane crash.

To tell the tale of Pandu
Will not detain us long;
His slogan was a ‘can do!’
And on his lips a song.

‘Away with Tolstoy, Ruskin, Buddha:
Their ideas just make little men littler.
No more “truth force”, only yuddha –
It’s time to learn from that chap Hitler.’

So saying, our angry hero
Became the country’s first Fascist;
Admiring Roma’s latest Nero
He practised how to clench his fist.
(Ninth Book, 50)


Pandu, in the novel, leaves the country for Germany on a path divergent from both the Gangan philosophy spelled by Tharoor in his prose and the events as recorded in the verses of Mahabharat. But inspite of his many liberties with both the histories the author claims his story to be true.

The song I sing is neither verse nor prose.
Can the gardener ask why he is pricked by the rose?
What I tell you is a slender filament,
A rubbing from a colossal monument;
But it is true.
(Eighth Book, 46)


The characters and the places of The Great Indian Novel though are not true in totality to either of history they are nevertheless true in parts to either or sometimes both the histories. Almost everyone eventually dies in the novel and summing the parts of their lifetimes one can tag each character to some symbol or leader of Indian polity. Hence, Pandu whose truth is opposed to Gangaji’s is Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and Dhritarashtra, the blind king who couldn’t see like the rest around him is Nehru, the idealist and a Fabian Socialist. The other important character who has an important role to play to the climax of the novel that apes the Indian Independence Struggle in minute detail is Mohammad Ali Karna, the father of Karnistan (The Hacked Off Land).

It is in this part of the novel till climax that Tharoor sparkles with the brilliance of his insight and narration, sounding most convincing with the precise conformity of his allegory to the history. He uses the skills not only of his career as diplomat but probably also of his stint at St. Stephens as a student of History. In his satire he tries to get inside the heads of the leaders who enacted the great historical drama leading to partition. At one point he writes...


… Where Dhritrashtra learned to brew his own tea in England, Karna acquired taste for Scotch and cocktail sausages. Far from praying five times a day, he prided himself on his scientific and therefore agnostic, cast of mind. His outlook was that of an Englishman of his age and profession: ‘modern’ (to use an adjective that has outlived more changes of connotation than any other in the language), formalist, rational, secular. It was not Islam that separated him from Gangaji, but Hinduism.

In other words, Karna found the Kauravs under Gangaji insufficiently secular, and this made him, paradoxically, more consciously Muslim. Gangaji’s efforts to transcend his Hindu image by stressing the liberalism of his interpretation of it only made the matters worse. When the Mahaguru , in one of his more celebrated pronouncements, declared his faith in all religions with the words, ‘I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew,’ Karna responded darkly: ‘Only a Hindu could say that’. (Seventh Book, 38)


The other important feature of Shashi Tharoors writing is his hard hitting humor which doesn’t spare the loftiest of figures both mythological and the real. He makes a jest of Lord Mountbatten or Mahatma Gandhi with the same candour as that of Dharmaraj and his Dharma towards the end of his book. And this is one of the reasons why The Great Indian Novel is a successful satire both political and religious.

VVji who has his sources everywhere including the bedroom of the last Viceroy of India, the charming Lord Drewpad, reproduces a conversation between the Lord and the Lady Georgina Drewpad. Lord Drewpad as he trims his moustache, tweezes his eyebrows, files his nails, combs his recalcitrant curls and squints critically at mirror for hours before going to bed says ---

‘I won’t be ruling it, dear, just giving it away,’ her husband replied, patting cologne onto his cheek. ‘And, besides, I think they have chosen me because I am young. We are the glamorous brigade, you see, marching forth to the skirl of bagpipes. They can’t send an old dodderer who would make it look as if we were only leaving India because we haven’t the strength to carry on.’
‘Why are we leaving India, then?’
‘Because we haven’t the strength to carry on.’ (Tenth Book, 62)



Lord and Lady leave India soon after their honeymoon, after their swift cartographers draw mindless lines on maps leaving millions moping across those lines. The lines that extended for miles both on land and in memories that no amount of fiction can ever mop up is completely sidelined in Tharoor’s novel. Instead he focuses on the leaders who faltered at the momentous occasion. Gangaji who dominates throughout the novel fails to dominate when it mattered most and dies when Amba the assassin pumps three bullets in his already broken heart. And then deviating from the history as we know from our text books, Shashi Tharoor writes of the last words that departing Gangaji utters ---

‘I …have … failed,’ he whispered.
And then he was gone, and the light, as Dhritrashtra was to say, went out of our lives.
(Eleventh Book,69)


Dhritrashtra is another important character who rises to prominence after Gangaji’s death for a brief period before his own life ebbs away after the heartbreak. Besides portraying the blind king in grand roles of fathering Draupadi Mokarasi (D. Mokarasi symbolizing democracy) Tharoor also takes a peek at his personal life writing in detail both about his cold relation with his wife Gandhari the Grim and his liaison with the glamorous Georgina Drewpad.

Though the focus of The Great Indian Novel is more on telling the story of modern India, Tharoor doesn’t miss to pick up on the Mahabharat itself at places. One of those places where he diverges from the epic to comply his characters with the modern context and re-invent the age old epic simultaneously concerns Gandhari the Grim.

‘Useful? It is not a wife’s role to be useful.’…. ‘No, my lord, a dharmpatni is not expected to be useful. Her duty is to share the life of her husband, its joys and triumphs and sorrows, to be by his side at all times, and to give him sons.’ A note of steely wistfulness crept into her voice. ‘A hundred sons.’
Dhritrashtra had never known a woman like this in England. He tried to inject a note of playfulness into the conversation. ‘Not a hundred. That would be exhausting.’ (Third Book,14)


So, unlike the Gandhari of the Mahbharat, Tharoor’s Gandhari the Grim bears only one child, a daughter named Priya Duryodhani. Gandhari dies as well, waiting for her husband; her eyes still open behind the blindfold, casting a deep impression on her daughter who later looms large over the entire story entering into a new phase with a new generation of characters.

Tharoor tries his best to record every important political detail of Independent India through his assortment of characters from Mahabharat. However, with the increasing number of characters and increasing complexity and divergence of two histories the author finds it difficult to embrace the enormity of his task and it shows at places.

But, as usual, Ganapathi – you are not strict enough with me – I digress; my mind wanders across this vast expanse of nation like the five heroes whose tale I am trying to relate. Yet we cannot tell it all; we must soar above the mountains and the valleys…
… And occasionally we must swoop down to watch them at closer quarters, as they perform the acts and utter the words that give our geography it’s history. (Fourteenth Book,86)


Similar to the epic Draupadi is married to five husbands, the Pandavs. Yudhistir stands for statesman and in later parts assume the persona of Morarji Desai. Bhim symbolizes Indian Army, Arjun the free press and Nakul and Sahdev who are always spoken of together represent bureaucrats and foreign diplomats respectively. Tharoor wraps up the story of Indian democracy under Priya Duryodhani in a chapter titled “The bungle Book – Or The Reign of Error.’ Author tries to give a glimpse of India from the passages of Pandavs across jungles and villages of the country, where they wander and gather wisdom under their guru Jaiprakash Drona or JD.

Towards the end, in a narration that seems to be written in a haste by the busy author playing multiple roles the in real life, all the characters converge to gain control over the political power. Finally, the Pandavs triumph under JD. But the triumph is short lived and Priya Duryodhani like Indira Gandhi bounces back to recover her lost glory. But she dies too paying the price for her high handedness, the details of which and the story thereafter are not spelled in an already overgrown novel.

The last chapter aptly titled The Path to Salvation describes the ascent of Himalayas by Pandavs, Draupadi and Krishna on their way to heaven. Krishna symbolizing the intelligentsia is first to fall for he didn’t used his capacity to strengthen democracy and restrained himself to the backwaters of some place down south in the country as well as in Tharoor’s rendition of history. D.Mokrasi fails next for she has to depend on her husbands. She is followed by Nakul and Sahdev who valued institutions more than the incorporated values. The arrogant Arjun is next followed by powerful Bhim who served his brothers more than D.Mokrasi. Yudhistir the statesman is alone to complete the ascent and pass all the tests inflicted by Dharmaraj upon him and enlighten his examiner with his new acquired wisdom.


India is eternal….. But the dharma appropriate for it at different stages of its evolution has varied
'No more certitudes,' he called out desperately to the receding figure . 'Accept doubt and diversity. Let each man live by his own code of conduct, so long as he has one. Derive your standards from the world around you and not from a heritage whose relevance must be constantly tested. Reject equally the sterility of ideologies and the passionate prescriptions of those who think themselves infallible. Uphold decency, worship humanity, affirm the basic values of our people- those which do not change- and leave the rest alone. Admit that there is more than one Truth, more than one Right, more than one dharma...'
(Eighteenth Book, 123)


VVji who comes close to the figure of Raja Gopalachari explains many Indian parables and myths to Ganapathi, asserting wisdom of India and its people grappling with countless problems.To end his novel he gives a flavour of just another characteristic of the country that isn’t underdeveloped.


Your eyebrows and nose, Ganapathi, twist themselves into an elephantine question-mark. Have I, you seem to be asking, come to the end of the story?How forgetful you are: it was just the other day that I told you stories never end, they just continue somewhere else. In the hills and the plains, the hearths and the hearts, of India.

But my last dream, Ganapathi, leaves me with a far more severe problem. If it means anything, anything at all, it means that I have told my story so far from a completely mistaken perspective .I have thought about it, Ganpathi, and I realise I have no choice. I must retell it.
(Eighteenth Book, 123)



I see the look of dismay on your face. I am sorry, Bimbo ...errr..Ganpathi.
(Eighteenth Book, 123)

Friday, June 26, 2009

Muses: Of Driving, Office, Isosceles Trianlge and the Moon

Driving is a mindless thing. No wonder drivers get paid measly. I realise I was more cautious a driver when I had started. Now I almost sleep through it. Sometimes completely oblivious of mirrors, indicators and even the traffic lights. I do not have a license and I have never been booked for jumping any of the umpteen traffic lights. The whole department of transport seems a joke; a fraud to me. While driving, absorbed in my inner sanctum, something rarely wakes me barring an occasional horn honked hard. Now slowly I am getting convinced that if I shall ever attain enlightenment it would be while driving. If Buddha had a Peepal I have my car...:)

Whatever little I understand, I realise that correlating variables is an important aspect in analytics. Rot mathematical techniques may aid or facilitate it but it also is an art and asks for creativity. It is easy to forget this while doing routine assignments one after another. Pressing clutches before shifting gears. Where's the scope to create? I do not have an answer but I am sure that mindless applying of tools, techniques, models etc without grasping the context may turn the whole exercise a joke to a point where everything appears nothing but a fraud.

Drivel apart if I do not check my driving habits I may be heading for a disaster!

So, when SS comes and announces a general training session on the whole lending business by some Mr.GF from US, I say yes within.SS while he goes individually to different people checking their availability he skips me. I am an outsider but it gives me a vantage point which is very dear to me. Like sitting at the back of a class, passing out last in the college, taken for a dumb at times. I try not to mind!

SS by the way also is the short for the’ Schutzstaffel ‘ the infamous German protection squad under Hitler which later assumed disproportionate powers committing worst crimes against humanity.

A little later I am sitting in this room too close to the whiteboard. GF's talk reminds me of the stereotyped pot bellied money lenders in old Bollywood movies. They would invariably wear white perhaps to inspire trust. Sitting with legs folded on a 'gaddi' behind a 'munshi table' wearing a cunning smile, these lenders mostly served as complicating agents in the movie plots. I look with disgust at GF for a moment. Rest of the talk I liked him for his organisation, humor and explaining clearly at outset about his concentric circle approach whose innermost basic cicle we couldn't somehow break away from during whole length of the talk.

Much of his content and explanation was also guided by the kind of questions he was asked so we couldn't blame it on him if we didn't like his talk. ‘The onus was on us’. Perhaps we didn't ask the right questions. At one point I felt a question rumbling inside me. I had just read an article prior to the talk about the credit card companies in US decreasing their lines due to weaning credit. It increased the Debt-to-Limit ratio by 50% in certain cases with a potential to affect the scores of concerning customers. Now, only if there were some less overt ways to manipulate the scores of customers so that only the manipulating company is left with the 'real' information while others are just left speculating over whom to offer a loan. I still think for the interest of the larger group I kept quite.. :))

The room was filled with smart people. I don't know if GF noted there were just two ladies. It was reconfirmation that analytics is similar to IIT when it comes to the gender ratio. Now how many girls would rack their brains trying to prove that if a triangle has two equal internal angle bisectors then it is necessarily isosceles?? My neighbour on the right warns me about its complexity. I take note and on the whole way back home while driving I think over it, driving oblivious of other fellow travelers, distracted couple of times only by the beautiful thin crescent the moon has been since last few days floating across the Delhi night sky. Earlier the way to the office was spent thinking of my father, revisiting old memories. I wonder how much we forget in relationships. I wonder how different people can get on a single day with their thinking alone.

I finally meet Neil Padukone at Green Park. I am disappointed he is not even remotely related to Deeepika Padukone but m delighted that he is writing a book collaborating with some think tank. Now what exactly is think tank I shall ask him sometime next. At present he is here to see the accommodation that I am planning to share with him. We go through the place. I explain him my plans. He listens attentively and leaves, deferring his decision until tomorrow. At the precise moment I receive a call from the property dealer that the room has been taken by some other client. As I turn looking upwards cursing my luck I see the bow shaped moon again behind the silhouette of a giant old tree. The yellow bow in the dark blue sky. It's beautiful and you don't have to steal glances at it. The moon doesn't mind being looked at lovingly.

Later in the night I google and come across the solution to isosceles triangle problem. I find sleep, contented that I was thinking in the right direction. I believe means if right shall eventually get you to the right end!

Monday, June 8, 2009

OnBlogging: Writing,Blogging,Loving,Flirting...

Writing is a serious thing. Blogging is a fling.If writing is loving then blogging is flirting. Writers spend months,years or decades to produce a jewel that shines beyond their lifetimes.Writing needs patience. Writer is a believer. He isn't lazy and he might work his ass off trying to find that one right word that sometimes doesn't even exist. Like love it eludes but he is at it, focused, oblivious of the life passing by.This creativity to his satisfaction is his life.Writers are a different breed. Rare and Dying!

'Writers are assholes! ' -- a blogger may write thus and attract more than hundred million visits. He may title his blog 'the best page in the universe' and hoardes of easily impressionable idiots may scoop every pointless point he poops in there. And that exactly is the point of blogging.You may be dumb,different,dissent or indecent; you still can publish and reach out to your kinds. So is my attempt.

Blogger is a 'cool dude'.He is seldom fixated with a word. He works with the substitutes.Mostly he writes crap. So, most of the blog titles have words synonymous with nonsense,madness,confusion etc. Most blogs die their own slow death .Few others, however readable are easily forgetable. Who cares?! Like a flirtatious glance it is to be enjoyed while it lasts. Why to ponder over its permanence?

Blogosphere is buzz with newness. Blogspace is more a place to share than to create. An active blogger posts frequently and an active blog has larger no. of visitors sometimes quantified by Alexa Rank. This activity pretty much sums up the life as a Blogger. Shelf life of a post seldom goes beyond the last posted comment. Bloggers are breeding. Already too many and increasing.

I see blogging as my flirting with writing. Flirting may lead to love and I may write something someday.Hope never dies! Until that time I would like to 'post' things here that I could edit, re-edit and revisit many times even after the last commet has been posted and replied!

Bimbo says there is no harm in healthy flirting. I am not sure what she means by 'healthy' but I shall accept her unquestioningly.She is always right.. :)

And for all you dumbos who are new to blogging here's a starter.Educate yourself!!

Saturday, June 6, 2009

Rhymes: some rhymes from old times..

I have some fascination with rhymes. If you try hard I think you can write a rhyme for any occasion reflecting any sentiment. It sometimes is very pleasing and satisfying to have expressed a complex idea in some simplest words. We may grow in our respective personal and professional lives but we should never fail to reach out to the innocent,trusting child in us which we were all once. My writing rhymes is one such attempt.

Many of my rhymes are lost and I feel sad for them. Through this blog I hope to give them a little longevity. Here, I recall some of the good old rhymes that I penned or rather tip-tapped on the keypad.Few of these have been shared widely with friends.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Limericks:

Once in a city much older than France
I got a chance to work in Finance
A tower so tall, I didn't see
A museum so big, not for me
Ahh! This work full of 'sheet' in Finance!

* written in 2007, describes my initial summer internship experience in Paris..bogged with my work and preparation for CFA Level I exams I hadn't seen either Eiffel or Louvre during first four weeks. A sequel and an antithesis to the above written before leaving Paris is sadly lost now... :(

I shall add more to this section as I excavate more from the past!
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Haikus :

I call
You loose temper
I sleep

And this day
Quite to your dismay
I write

Well, Haikus which are three line poems with less than 17 syllables are deceptive in their appearance and the better ones present two contrasting ideas left for the reader to decipher. One of the better Haikus for starters that I read on Wikipedia goes like...

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...And Some Random Rhymes:

One on myself

Once I was a storyteller
a charmer with words
then I lost my voice,
my head,my heart, my hair..:))

..but not one to accept defeat
albeit with shaking feet
I am finding my voice sane
taking heart, yet again!

....and another rhyme dedicated to a 'shy n sweet' friend

Anukriti -- to tell she is pretty
won't be a lie
if u can try
her poems few
And this is how i grew
- fond of her!

Her poems i reject, she writes fast!
Her feelings i respect,she thinks vast!
Her friendship is such,
Things heavy how much,
You can empty on her!

Usually mild, potentially wild
An adult trapping an exulting child
Warm yet coy
I wish her a boy
Who fathoms her heart
Or some of its part
Since grasping the whole
Is a futile goal
That no man should aim
Without giving up on same
- all his life!!

...and the one aching with the longing to be accepted as a friend...

You make me sad at times,
But never it lasts for long;
With all my stupid reasons n rhymes,
I have to bounce back strong.

And then some day;
I hope you will say --

"Well, you win! I give in,
Now both our hairs are grey;
I thought you'd wean, but it's long been,
Now I have something to say."

Such time will come and come it must,
For your fears and reasons to end,
To not to forgive, and not to trust,
And not to accept me as friend.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

BookReview : India Unbound - Gurcharan Das

Reading is one of my favourite pastimes.You may abhor the idea if you think yourself as one of the fun-loving,action oriented types. But then I bet you never laid your hands on the right book.Reading can be fun. It can 'broaden your horizons' wherein you can see the fun in things you thought were boring earlier.Reading has the potential to make your life more lively where it just doesn't goes on and on from one day to another.


I shall present a very strong case for reading sometime later. Here, I write about a book that got me interested more in reading. Furhter, I believe one shouldn't read passively or only for pleasure.Reading with a purpose will not only help you select the right books but increase you exploits from the reading experiences. If you read with a questioning mind correlating facts and corroborating evidences from your real life it would not only help you to become more practical but give you a distinct voice of your own too. My voice however seems struck with nursery rhymes...

Now without much ado
I present the book review
which I wrote long ago
for my witty bimbo**
my coochie my coo my puff-paste
who makes my readings all waste
for what good is a book-pile
that fails to bring her one smile!


"...Well, 'India Unbound' is a book that I re-read recently. Both the book and it's author has impressed me very very much. It's author - Gurcharan Das, when he was a baby, his parents laid him on the feet of the Guru at Satsang Beas who named him 'Guru+Charan+Das'.


You may find more useful details about the author at this site:
http://www.ccsindia.org/gdas/gurcharandas.htm


This book though being a non-fiction goes like a gripping story of transformations that India underwent since independence with particular focus on it's economic policies and their manifestations. I better take care not to sound too technical, learning from the author of the book, Gurcharan Das(GD). His book is intended for layman and serves as a very good entry point into many things at once. Reading it interested me more into host of things like history, sociology, politics, economics, business, management and most importantly correlating pieces and visualizing the future.

It's written in a very crafty manner...unlike this review.. and personal anecdotes from author's life dot the narration of various factors shaping the country. And this is what makes it enjoyable unlike other non-fictions. So we come to know that GD sold news paper, went to Harvard, worked with Procter and Gamble (India) since its infancy and took voluntary retirement to write and now he serves as a consultant to a number of companies living happily with his wife somewhere near IIT in posh South Delhi itself. He is cash rich with children all settled. He has already lived the 'middle-class household dream' that we have been entrusted by our parents and which many of us will realise or are realising while working in the glass towers at Gurgaon and elsewhere..lols.

However commuting between glass towers and our homes, doing our routine part and returning home exhausted day after day many of us slowly get alienated from a larger context. This is where we begin to differ from GD. Most people reduce them to money making machines,trapped in their EMIs, chasing the middle-class dream but few like Nandan Nilekani who are leading big corporations like Infosys have to inevitably know this greater context that books like India Unbound makes us laymen aware of. (Nilekani's book 'Imagining India' can be another good read.)

GD in his wide angle view of Indian economy invokes history as old as Alexander-Puru battle to give plausible explanations. He writes about failings of leaders as great as Gandhi and Nehru. Quoting from Adam Smith to Amartya Sen he investigates things like 'developement' and 'modernization'. He charts routes of Ambanis' success in frustrating license raj and few business failures post liberation.He identifies values we acquire in families and castes and nations and their implications in business.

GDs canvas is very wide and lot of things converge in his complex context following a strict time line spread over 364 pages which I can't reproduce here. But most importantly it gives a lesson to inculcate in us an insatiable hunger to know, to tinker to think and to see trends and connections between what we know, to vision what the future would be like and finally to use it to our advantage. His book ends at very optimistic note predicting the boundless opportunities that exist after India was unbounded in 'the golden summer of 91' with initial economic reforms.

The rest I leave for you to discover yourself if you choose to read the book, which I think one should in our positions. For ours is a formative period and we have to be conscious about what we are feeding our minds with and what we keep thinking in our heads. My head reels with just one thought however..."

My pretty bimbo
would you now be please kind
and get out of my mind .. :))

** Bimbo for now is a figment of my imagination. But being a hardcore romantic I firmly believe she is there somewhere. I have invented her with my craving for giving love and being loved. She does inspire many beautiful thoughts. She would surface frequently in my writings just the way she intrudes the interludes between flipping of a book page or uploading of a webpage. She is always on my mind. More on bimboo,my undying love for her and the detailed psychoanalysis sometime soon .. :)

..to start with!!

I should have started lot earlier.Weighed by my own expectations I waited enough to gain perspective, voice, opinions, art, wit,wisdom etc, etc. Finally, I realise that 'now' was the time since long back. Anyways, it's never late to begin... :)

Here's a rhyme that is somewhat similar to my sentiments at present. Slowly, I shall unfold different dimensions of this blog. However, to start on a positive note I am sharing this simple rhyme. Here it goes...

Do it Now
-------------------------
If you have hard work to do
Do it now
Today the skies are clear and blue
To-morrow the clouds may come in view
Yesterday is not for you
Do it now

If you have a song to sing
Sing it now
Let the tones of gladness ring
Clear as song of bird in spring
Let each day some music bring
Sing it now

If you have some kind words to say
Say them now
Tomorrow may not come your way
Do a kindness while you may
Loved ones will not always stay
Say them now

If you have a smile to show
Show it now
Make hearts happy roses grow
Let the friends around you know
The love you have before they go
Show it now

Actually, I got it from my father's diary at home. He must have noted it down from somewhere. He's not into poems or writing diaries. He's very practical and quite prosaic and would never show any weakness,particularly of heart. It's only mother who lets his secrets out to us. Me and my sister. His diary had more numbers scribbled than words... phone no.s, money dealings and all. He is retired, richly experienced and well above the youthful emotional vagaries that people of my age are prone to. Still, he not only appreciated but also noted down these lines in his diary. And that's why this poem which initially I would have casually read and easily forgotten, I thought to share it here.

And the point NOW....

If you ever wanted to blog
Blog it now
Write of any princess and frog
Or crib about your boss rogue
Story,rhyme or an error log
Blog it now!!