Review: Last Man in Tower

review

Last Man in Tower
Aravind Adiga
HarperCollins
Rs. 699
Pp 432
ISBN: 9789350290842
Hardcover

About the book
Ask any Bombaywallah about Tower A of the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society and you will be told that it is unimpeachably pucca. Despiteits location close to the airport and bordered by slums, it has been pucca for some fifty years. But then Bombay has changed in half a century not least its name – and the world in which Tower A was first built is giving way to a new city, a Mumbai of new development and new money; of wealthy Indians returning with fortunes made abroad.

When real estate developer Dharmen Shah offers to buy out the residents of Vishram Society, planning to use the site to build a luxury apartment complex, his offer is more than generous. Yet not everyone wants to leave; many of them have lived in Vishram for years, many of them are no longer young. But none can benefit from the offer unless all agree to sell. As tensions rise, one by one those who oppose the offer give in to the pressure of the majority, until only one man stands in the way of Shah’s luxury high-rise: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher, once the most respected man in the building. Shah is a dangerous man to refuse, but as the demolition deadline looms, Masterji’s neighbours – friends who have become enemies, acquaintances turned co-conspirators – may stop at nothing to score their payday. A suspense-filled story of money and power, luxury and deprivation; a rich tapestry peopled by unforgettable characters, not least of which is Bombay itself, Last Man in Tower opens up the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of a great city – ordinary people pushed to their limits in a place that knows none.

Reviews:
Full review here Guardian
If the residents of Tower A, Vishram Society, pride themselves on anything, it is their respectability – their "pucca" way of life in their "unimpeachably pucca" apartment building. Once pink, Tower A may now be a "rainwater-stained, fungus-licked grey"; it may not boast an uninterrupted supply of running water; it may sit amid the slums of Vakola, in the flight path of Mumbai's domestic airport; and it may be falling into a state of disrepair unchecked by its ineffectual secretary. But Vishram Society's virtues outweigh its failings; a model of neighbourliness and middle-class virtue, it brings together those of different backgrounds – originally built for a Catholic population, it admitted Hindus in the 1960s and "the better kind of Muslim" in the 80s – in harmonious testimony to the possibility of cooperative living. That, at least, is the theory, although Aravind Adiga's painful tragicomedy demolishes it more quickly than Dharmen Shah, his ruthless property developer, throws up his luxury redevelopments.

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Full review here Telegraph
In his first, Man Booker-winning novel, The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga captured the contradictions of the new India; in this, his third book, he goes further: they are quite literally the building blocks of his plot.

Last Man in Tower tells the story of a struggle for a slice of shining Mumbai real estate, bringing all of Adiga’s gifts for sharp social observation and mordant wit to the fore.
The “last man” of the title is Yogesh Murthy, or “Masterji” as he is affectionately known, a retired schoolteacher who gives top-up science classes in his spare time. He lives in a crumbling but “absolutely, unimpeachably pucca” middle-class block of flats in the Vishram Housing Society. The water only works for a couple of hours twice a day and each monsoon threatens to bring the roof in; but this is still an idyll representing what was once, itself, “new India”. Citizens of every religion rub along together in a way, Adiga writes, that would have made Nehru proud.

-o-o-o-Full review here Hindustan Times
There comes a point in Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, a chronicle of his love-hate relationship with Bombay, where he takes Paul Theroux’s ‘Bombay-smells-of-money’ argument up by a notch to conclude, “Bombay is a city in which everything is on broad, public display. Nothing is hidden.” This simplistic observation stands apart from the rest of the book, which repeatedly asserts that you cannot describe Bombay in black and white, for beneath the surface of this seemingly monochromatic megalopolis lies a vibrant spectrum of greys.

This is where Aravind Adiga enters with his third book (and second novel) Last Man In Tower. If people, not steel and glass, impart Mehta’s florid and fragile Bombay its character, Adiga’s admiration for Mumbai forms the foundation of his latest novel.

“I was born in India, raised here and I love it here,” says Adiga. But that love didn’t go unopposed. In 2008, Adiga faced the ire of self-styled nationalists who read too much into the journalist-turned-author’s debut novel The White Tiger (which went on to win the Man Booker Prize), and involuntarily transformed him into a critic of India’s social and economic dichotomies. The story of the clash of an advancing India with its primitive self, where the eponymous character-narrator Balram Halwai’s “schematic and limited” vision of life was mistaken to be that of Adiga’s, exposed to the world a nation caught with its pants down, ‘loyalists’ felt.


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Full review here Financial Times
Land, today, has become the most valuable resource in India, lying at the dark confluence of politics, money, business and pure human avarice. With the economy growing at breakneck pace, the pressure for the acquisition and development of land has never been greater. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Mumbai, India’s commercial capital. As rents and property prices have skyrocketed, so has grown the public outcry against the city’s rapacious redevelopment. A veteran journalist lamented recently that every government in the region “has been the government of the builders, by the builders and for the builders”.

Aravind Adiga’s latest novel Last Man in Tower examines this sharpening crisis from the perspective of the residents of an old apartment block in north-west Mumbai. Vishram Society “is anchored like a dreadnought of middle-class respectability” in a neighbourhood populated by slums. Despite its peeling paint and 47-year-old brickwork, the grandmotherly building is spoken of with reverence because its residents “pay taxes, support charities, and vote in local and general elections”.

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Full review here DNA

Last Man In Tower is set in Tower A of the Vishram Co-operative Housing society in Vakola, Mumbai. It is an aging, run-down apartment building inhabited by a disappearing breed, the middle class. The occupants of Tower A are a closely knit bunch, having supported each other through many crises, trials and tragedies. Yet, when a builder approaches the society with a lucrative offer, friendships that have spanned decades start to fall apart.

The novel takes for inspiration a phenomenon that has swept every Indian metro in recent years: middle class families wooed by sky-rocketing property prices sell their modest homes and move into penthouses, swapping their scooters for cars, Godrej almaris for imported teak cupboards, thrifty habits for a lifestyle of affluence. In Adiga’s Last Man In Tower, a retired sixty-one year old science teacher, ‘Masterji’, is the last man to resist the builder’s offer.

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Full review here GQ India

When Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger swept to victory in the Man Booker Prize, instead of throwing bouquets, Indian critics threw brickbats. A barrage of epithets, rather unfairly, rained in: stereotypical, dull, demeaning and tedious.

The writer’s third novel, Last Man in Tower, might not change their minds entirely. A taut, visceral tale based in Mumbai, this literary pot-boiler probes urban redevelopment, a festering sore in a city where land is scarce and invaluable. Adiga’s minutely detailed and almost voyeuristic insights into the lives of the dwellers of a cosmopolitan housing society are bigger than the plot, though.

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Full review here Washington Post 

Funny, provocative and decadent: Aravind Adiga’s “Last Man in Tower” is the kind of novel that’s so richly insightful about business and character that it’s hard to know where to begin singing its praises.

That Adiga knows economics well should come as no surprise. After all, he worked as a financial journalist for Time magazine in India, and his first novel, “The White Tiger,” reveled in the darker consequences of a world turned flat. The story described a servant seduced by visions of wealth who murders his way out of poverty. It was as popular as it was controversial in India, and in Britain it captured the Man Booker Prize.

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Full review here Seattle Times

Aravind Adiga, winner of the Man Booker Prize for "The White Tiger," brings readers another look at an India at once simple and complex, as old as time and brand new.

The Mumbai residents of Tower A, Vishram Society, get along very well; Catholic, Muslim and Hindu sharing what was once a thoroughly first-class building. Their home is now short on light and running water, long on flaking, rainwater-stained walls and in need of the periodic services of the seven-kinds-of-vermin man.

Despite these shortcomings, Vishram dwellers are content, until they meet Dharmen Shah, an eminently successful and ruthless developer and his "left-hand man," the enforcer, Shanmugham.

Shah, who is not a well man, wants to ensure his legacy by building "The Shanghai," a modern high-rise, on the site of Tower A. He offers each tenant more money than any of them could amass in a lifetime, just to relocate. This offer is met with great rejoicing all around, except by one person: Yogesh A. Murthy, known as "Masterji," age 61, a retired schoolteacher and a recent widower.


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Full review here Independent

In Mumbai, property development is a serious business. Sometimes deadly serious.

Prime land is costly; human life is cheap. The Vishram Society is a middle-class housing co-operative based in a block to the city's east. The area has become intensely desirable, and property developer Dharmen Shah is determined to tear Vishram down and replace it with luxury apartments. Yet not all Vishram's residents are willing to be bought out, despite Shah's generous offers. Opposition centres around Yogesh Murthy, nicknamed "Masterji", an obdurate retired teacher and widower.

Aravind Adiga is most famous, of course, for his Booker prize-winning novel The White Tiger. It told the story of a downtrodden servant who was willing to go to shocking extremes to get the better of his masters. Subtle it wasn't, but the savage energy of its satire could not be ignored. Adiga's next volume, Between the Assassinations, was a collection of stories set in a fictitious southern Indian town, also focussing on poverty and corruption. In it, Adiga's facility with language came further to the fore in a series of evocative cameos that captured the town's stagnation.

Winners and losers in the "New India"

Finely written, carefully reported, and imaginatively conceived, Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (Faber and Faber, Inc.) is one of the outstanding nonfiction books of 2011. Deb was born in Shillong, India in 1970, and now lives in Brooklyn. He teaches creative writing at the New School. He responded to questions from Scott Sherman via e-mail.

After publishing two novels, you decided to write a nonfiction book on India. Why?
I’d just come out with a novel that was rather poorly published. I didn’t have a job and depended entirely on freelance income and my book advance, and I was about to be a father. Any novel I wrote would take some years, and although I very much wanted to write a novel, I had this wild idea that it would be easier to sell a nonfiction book on proposal. I thought I’d get an advance, do the book quickly, and get back to the novel, and here I am, some six years later.

I didn’t sell the book on proposal in the U.S., although the proposal was shopped around. I remember one American publisher listening to my pitch and saying, “Yeah, I remember when I went to Delhi for the first time.” And I thought, ‘You know what, this ain’t Alabama.’ After some conversations of this nature, there was an offer too low so I refused to take it. But it did sell on proposal in Britain and in Canada. That helped buy some diapers. The Society of Authors in the U.K. gave me a generous grant to research the book, which went to buying more diapers. Most of the research was done on credit card debt, which funded the tickets between India and New York. I also depended on the hospitality of friends and strangers in India, and my thankfully unprivileged upbringing in India which allowed me to report on the cheap, skimping on things like cars and drivers and resorting to buses and auto rickshaws for the most part.

That’s how it started. But people were also interested in the nonfiction pieces I’d been writing on India, especially this cover story I did on Indian call centers for the Guardian weekend magazine. Most of the nonfiction stuff on India that I was reading was of the boosterish, “India Shining” variety, and I wondered if I could write something that was both critical and “alive,” something like a novel but based on reporting and research.

What languages do you speak, and what languages did you use in the reporting? 
My mother tongue is Bengali. I used mostly Hindi and English, and a bit of Assamese when I ran into some security guards from Assam in a factory in Andhra Pradesh.

Full interview here Brooklyn Rail

Review: The Beautiful and the Damned

review 

The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India
Siddhartha Deb
Viking/ Penguin
Rs 499; Pp 224
ISBN : 9780670085965
Hardcover

About the book 

In 2004, after six years in New York, Siddhartha Deb returned to India to look for a job. He discovered that sweeping change had overtaken the country. With the globalization of its economy, the relaxation of trade rules, the growth in technology and the shrinking down of the state, a new India was being born. Deb realized he had found his job: to explore this vast, complex and bewildering nation and try to make sense of what was underway.

The Beautiful and the Damned is the triumphant outcome. It is an original and innovative work that combines personal narrative, travelogue, reportage, penetrating analysis and the stories of many individuals across a vast range of geographical and social circumstances.

Deb talks to the great and good and those in charge, but listens as intently to the worker at the call centre remaking herself from her provincial moorings and the migrant sweatshop worker trying to make his way in the city. By listening to the stories of the people he meets and works alongside Deb shows how people caught in the midstream of these changes actually experience them.

Visiting the metropolises, small towns and villages, as well as both gated suburban communities and camps for displaced peasants, Deb offers a panoramic view of the changes in landscape and urban geography, creating an epic narrative of the people who make up the world’s second most populous nation.

With a novelist’s vision, Siddhartha Deb’s extraordinary book paints a portrait of India through the story of its people: aspiring and deluded, desperate and hopeful, beautiful and damned.

Reviews:
New India, old angle Business Standard
Relying on preconceived notions, Siddhartha Deb misses the real story.

The book you are about to read does not have a first chapter: you will find that the text jumps from the end of the introduction to the second chapter,” declares Siddhartha Deb in the author’s note of this book. It’s a pity, because those who read the first chapter, which was also published in the February 2011 issue of Caravan magazine, would agree that it is the most engaging of the five chapters that portray life in the “new” India. Because of an injunction order for defamation obtained by its subject, this chapter (“The Great Gatsby: A Rich Man in India”) on self-styled management guru Arindam Chaudhuri was pulled out of the book. The surviving four essays, unfortunately, are more a reflection of an armchair leftist’s world view than a real assessment of the India we live in today.

Deb takes you through the rural heartland and bustling cities where he encounters the protagonists of his emerging-India story. They are engineers, farmers, call centre employees, migrant labourers, communists, a right-wing extremist and a waitress in New Delhi. Chance encounters with mobile phone thieves, middle-class aspirers and policemen on encounter squads complete the picture. Through these characters, Deb seeks to give us a glimpse of a country afflicted by class struggle and a highly “tiered” society with “gated communities” for the elite and no room for the poor. The narrative touches on deprivation and surplus, SEZs and farmers’ suicides, alienation and the “high consumption” side of globalisation.

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Full review here Hindustan Times

There’s a tremendous hole in The Beautiful And The Damned: Life in the New India, by Siddhartha Deb. One whole chapter is missing. So after the author’s note and the introduction, we turn straight to chapter 2 on page 72. According to the publisher’s note, chapter 1, ‘The Great Gatsby: A Rich Man in India’ “has been removed in accordance with an injunction order passed by the Civil Court, Silchar in a suit for defamation”. The suit was filed by one Kishorendu Gupta and the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM).

Fair enough. There is a case, and if Deb and his Indian publishers choose to argue it, the case will come up in court at some point in this country’s future. Meanwhile, as Deb says tiredly over the phone from New York, “It’s interesting that in a book that looks at the real stories behind the ‘new’ India, it’s the single chapter about the rich and powerful that had to be pulled.”

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The Leak Sprung In The Engine Room Outlook

A nuanced probe under new India’s upper stories unearths the usual deprivation and a foundation crumbling away

The Beautiful and the Damned sounds good as a title but is misleading. One of the great merits of Siddhartha Deb’s portraits is their nuance. They are portraits of those he met while travelling across India, investigating the changes he found when he returned after six years in New York. He doesn’t write in black and white. He realises that in almost all cases various shades of grey are the nearest we can get to a true portrayal of anyone’s life.

This is not of course to say that Deb glosses over the insecurity, the danger, the poor pay, the backbreaking work of those oppressed by the changed India he found. But he portrays them as fellow human beings, not objects of pity. At the same time he doesn’t portray, for example, those who employ migrant workers as utterly heartless exploiters. There is even a lightness of touch to his description of a labour contractor.

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India's good, bad and ugly Gulf News

Modernisation is a violent process. Settled forms of existence are uprooted, ancient beliefs are abandoned and familiar hardships give way to unknown dangers. But risks also bring opportunities. India's post-independence settlement was paternalistic socialism — the state discouraged vulgar capitalism and the people remained untouched by material ambitions — that is, they stayed poor. Few got rich except gangsters and politicians.

In the past 20 years, though, there has been an explosion of free-market capitalism. Foreign companies such as Coca-Cola, once banned, are now welcomed. The growth of call centres, computer technology and car manufacturing has seen the country become the world's third-largest economy. The "million mutinies" V.S. Naipaul saw stirring in his 1990 book about India are now a billion and counting. In The Beautiful and the Damned, Siddhartha Deb has taken up Naipaul's mantle.

India’s modern mutinies

Asian powerhouse or failing state? Four reports provide an assessment from the margins of an economic boom

It has often been said of the Indian government that in trying to do too much, it has done too little. Socialist planning in the decades that followed the country’s independence in 1947 created state-owned steel mills, hotels and airlines. It also brought economic isolation and stultifying regulation. Meanwhile, New Delhi had neglected more basic needs such as primary education, public hygiene and women’s health.

Fast-forward and everything would seem to have changed. The growth rate has risen sharply over the past two decades to about 8 per cent and a vast Indian middle class has enticed billions of dollars in foreign investment from western multinationals seeking new consumers. Yet the unfinished economic reforms begun in 1991 have a poor report card in areas where the government must take the lead. The majority of the population still lacks access to a toilet, the average time children spend in school is about four years, and about half of those under the age of five are severely malnourished – a record worse than that of many countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

India is the land of paradox. And one of its central contradictions is that this most dynamic of economies also has many characteristics of a failing state.

The shadow of inept and iniquitous government looms large in each of the four books under review. A recurrent theme of Mark Tully’s India: The Road Ahead, Siddhartha Deb’s The Beautiful and the Damned, Arundhati Roy’s Broken Republic and Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing is that for all the progress of recent decades, the country’s growth has been far more corrupt, unequal and disruptive than it needed to be.

Full report here Financial Times

Q&A with Siddhartha Deb

New York-based novelist Siddhartha Deb's book of narrative nonfiction, The Beautiful And the Damned: Life In The New India hit bookstores in India earlier this month. I quite enjoyed interviewing him over email, and this Q&A first appeared in print in the DNA Books page on Aug 28, 2011, though in a heavily abridged form for want of space. Posting here the complete interview.

What was the transition like, from fiction to nonfiction? Do you think of yourself primarily as novelist who also writes nonfiction or as a nonfiction writer who also writes fiction? Which form gives you a bigger kick?
The transition to nonfiction was difficult for practical reasons. I had to fund long stretches of reporting, and that was difficult at the beginning. I also had to spend a lot of time away from my very young son, and I didn't enjoy that at all. But writing nonfiction is easier in the sense that the boundaries are more clearly defined, and so it's harder to go wrong. If you're reasonably methodical, you can produce something that is, at the very least, acceptable. With fiction, there are no clear boundaries, at least for me, which means there are many more ways to go wrong but also a shot at transcendence, at magic, at creating life out of even nonsense, all of which I rather like. Since I'm desperate to return to fiction, let's take this book as a novelist's foray into nonfiction.

Full interview here DNA

A multi-layered perspective

The Absent State:
Insurgency as an Excuse
 for Misgovernance
Neelesh Misra, Rahul Pandita
Hachette; Rs 495; Pp 350

The challenge by naxalites in a third of the country (affecting 231 out of 636 districts) is India’s biggest internal security threat today. Does the Maoist movement shape popular resistance to the state’s power or does the movement use people’s struggles to bid for state power? Scholarly and activist accounts reflect two points of view. One view sees Maoists as being neither peasants nor workers nor tribals (Dilip Simeon), but who claim to represent their interests. Alternatively, the movement is seen as a rebellion of the people who are striving to save their land, forests, water and minerals from being grabbed and establish a people’s democratic state under the leadership of the proletariat(Gautam Navlakha). Led by the Communist Party of India (Maoist)—which was banned under the UAPA Act in June 2009—the armed insurgency has become a key challenge for the Indian state.

Neelesh Misra and Rahul Pandita’s The Absent State: Insurgency as an Excuse for Misgovernance has the virtue of reflecting both points of view by providing us with a rich, multi-layered perspective on the Naxal insurgency (comprising the bulk of the book). They tell a story of misgovernance, of an absent state, of the loss of perspective (where it is easy to be labeled a traitor or a terrorist), of security personnel fighting an impossible battle for their own survival, and of fading hopes for local democracy. Their style —which is highly readable and accessible to an uninformed audience—effectively high- lights a Roshomon-like picture of the insurgency—the state’s view, the Naxal cadre’s view, and the villager’s view—and the complex relationship between the absent state, the growing power of the insurgents, and the impact on the everyday lives of the citizens in those areas.

Full review here Financial Express

Bharat darshan

Brilliant colours and images attract you the moment you look at the book. Then you flip through it, and find more, and more, reflecting the many facets of Indian life, rituals, traditions, modernity, democratic processes, including elections, people and their festivals—all find representation in this volume.

India for a Billion Reasons 
Ed. Amit Dasgupta
Wisdom Tree; Pp 222. Rs 3,495

No, it is not yet another coffee table book on India. What helps India for a Billion Reasons carve out its own identity is a substantial body of text. The editor has wisely allowed many expert voices to reflect on slices of the Indian experience, yet the introduction by this diplomat writer, whose book Indian by Choice had been reviewed in these columns two years ago, serves its purpose by explaining the format of the book, and introducing the essays that together make the book. While many of them are young minds, some are young at heart, together they lure us to add substance to the attractive colour pages and draw us to the text.

Any picture book on India has to negotiate clich`E9s, so does this, often quite successfully? Atri Bhattacharya contends that the "downside of the Indian experience is that it leaves us a little jaded for the rest of the world". Anita Ratnam is seeped in the dance tradition, and it shows in her article. Anjum Katyal tackles the difficult subject of art from India, while Ritu Sethi writes on the unbroken tradition of the living crafts.

Full review here Tribune

We are like this only

A collection of delightful essays on India, and Indian-ness.

What is it that defines our Indian-ness? What is it, exactly, that unites us — variously Punjabi, Malayali, Gujarati, Bengali or whatever — into a single nation-state?

A difficult question. There have, of course, been many attempts to answer it, ranging from the erudite to the glib, but none of them has been particularly convincing. A quarter of the way into reading Mother Pious Lady, however, I found myself stopping and saying to myself: Aha, so this is what it's all about; this is what it means to be Indian! Santosh Desai and I may belong to different parts of the country, different mother tongues, cultural backgrounds, religions, ethnic strains, family backgrounds, even perhaps age-groups — all the things that might conceivably divide us — yet, reading this book was like reading my own story; it seemed to suddenly unite us, brothers under the same skin. The book, and the typically Indian human insights it's filled with, make it the closest thing I've come across to a definitive statement of Indian-ness. This was obviously not Desai's intention when he sat down to write these delightful essays, but it's what he has, in effect, ended up doing.

The hare-tortoise myth

The twin stories of India and China are the most dramatic in the world economy. In 1820, the two countries contributed to nearly half of the world’s income. In 1950, their share was less than a tenth; and currently the two contribute a fifth. By 2025, their share of world income will be a third, according to projections. Both remain the world’s fastest growing big economies.

China, of course, hogs most of the glory. India was ahead of China in 1870, as well as in the 1970s, in terms of per capita income levels at international prices. But since 1990, China has surged ahead of India—China’s per capita income growth in the past two decades has been at least double India’s rate. It has invested nearly half its GDP, a scale of capital investment—mostly in building world-class infrastructure—that is unprecedented in the world’s economic history.

So the title of Raghav Bahl’s book Super Power? The Amazing Race between China’s Hare and India’s Tortoise, is a bit fey. Is there really a race? Is India even interested in playing catch up? Does China even need to look over its shoulder for a bounding India? Or is this phantasmagorical race purely the spin of feel-good entrepreneurs, phoney management gurus and an uncritical, gung-ho media?

Full report here Mint

Financial inner world of India's households

In 2007, a McKinsey report predicted that Indian consumption will quadruple by 2025 due to rising household income spurred by strong economic growth, India’s youthful demographic profile and a decline in the savings rate. This would make India the world’s fifth-largest consumer market, profoundly impacting both the manner in which businesses and policy-makers address the new “middle class” as well as the nature of savings in the subcontinent. Given the contraction in demand from traditional export markets abroad, domestic consumption trends in countries like India and China have become more relevant than ever before.

In that sense, How India Earns, Spends and Saves – Unmasking the Real India is well timed. Based on the results of the National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure (NSHIE) of 2004-05, conducted every five years, the book looks to unravel the complicated landscape of the Indian consumer.

 Divided into seven chapters, the book analyses the earning, spending and saving patterns of Indian households, and discusses income distributions and disparities, specifically dissecting the well-being of urban and rural consumers. Based on a survey that spans 440,000 households spread over 24 states, it is an exhaustive look into the financial inner world of Indian households.

Although the book offers little new material in the manner of analysis, the value-add is in the detail of the data it provides. Given the rising importance of the domestic market, it is crucial for businesses and policy-makers to understand emerging trends in earning, spending and saving.

Full review here Business Standard

Cheek by jowl

There is much talk of a race between India and China. The truth is that both countries pay remarkably little attention to each other, except in a few military and diplomatic arenas. Neither side is impressed by the other’s political systems and draws curiously few lessons from the other's economic policies.

Superpower: The Amazing Race
Between China's Hare
 and India's Tortoise
Raghav Bahl
Allen Lane
Rs 699; Pp 482

  

But the idea of two Asian giants caught in a giant nation-state rivalry makes good copy. Media magnate Raghav Bahl attempts to dig a little deeper, comparing the Indian tortoise and the Chinese hare. The two are compared at various levels, showing where one has an advantage and the other one is shackled. There is a set of interesting case studies of how the two handled areas like power, civil aviation and railways — generally with India getting the worse of it.

This is a fast moving text, at times veering close to incoherence. Skipping through history, geopolitics, demography, entrepreneurship, different bits of the economy, it tosses up a lot of data, a fair number of quotes (some of which are repeated) and an honest share of unanswered questions.

Full review here Hindustan Times

On markets and scams

India’s political and social structures have preserved entrepreneurs, if not exactly cut them loose, observes Raghav Bahl in ‘Superpower?’ (www.penguinbooksindia.com). Even as the state invested in big-ticket capital assets in the early decades after Independence, land continued to stay in private hands, he reasons in the chapter titled ‘Entrepreneurs, consumers and English speakers’.

“India’s sprawling rural economy has always been entirely ‘capitalist’ in its orientation. Even the urban economy allowed private enterprise to grow under a somewhat draconian regime of licences and approvals… The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) is among the oldest in Asia. Capital and credit have always been available, albeit for a ‘price,’ for private enterprise.”

Harshad Mehta episode
Of interest to finance professionals is a section in the chapter, captioned ‘the story of two stock markets,’ opening with how Harshad Mehta, who in his late thirties, ‘pulled off a stock market scam in India which would have put Bernie Madoff to shame.’ The year was 1992 and there was much excitement around a freshly minted, rapidly privatising economy, the author narrates.

Full report here Hindu

India or China

Raghav Bahl is the founder of Network18, a media conglomerate that owns CNBC-TV18, CNBC Awaaz, CNN-IBN, In.com, Moneycontrol and Forbes India. He is one of the pioneers of television journalism in India. Bahl’s book Superpower?: The Amazing Race Between China’s Hare and India’s Tortoise has been recently published by Penguin Allen Lane.

China and India lived together as peaceful, populous and prosperous neighbours until the 18th Century. Then colonial powers took control and enervated their prosperity. In 1914, the British drew the McMahon Line and ruptured their peace. China believes nearly 150,000 sq km of its territory was fraudulently transferred to India. Both countries went to war in 1962; a militarily under-prepared India was thrashed, opening up deep psychological scars which have not been repaired to this day. Then both got absorbed in fixing their damaged economies; China dazzled the world with its $5 trillion prowess, and India attracted attention with its $1.25 trillion play. Today, the world’s fastest and second fastest growing economies are locked in an uneasy clasp.

Full report here Forbes

A hot debate at Raghav Bahl's book launch

I am sure we have all heard the Hare and the Tortoise tale when we were little children. This time the Hare and the Tortoise are two neighboring countries (India and China) that went head to head at the book launch of Superpower? The Amazing Race Between China's Hare and India's Tortoise by Raghav Bahl on August 17 at 6.30 p.m. at Durbar Hall, Taj Palace Hotel, New Delhi.

This was no ordinary book launch where the author just gave an insight of his new book but in fact in my opinion, it was one of the most intellectual debates on the hottest topic of this decade. The panel consisted of Nandan Nilekani (Chairman, Unique Identification Authority of India), M Damodaran (Former Chairman, SEBI), Bimal Jalan (Former Governor, RBI) and Shekhar Gupta (Editor-in-Chief, The Indian Express). Rajdeep Sardesai and Shereen Bahn both moderated the healthy discussion that lasted for approximately 45 minutes.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Can India make up lost ground on China?

Is India ready for superpower status? Or are we irretrievably behind in the game of catch-up with China? What are our key strengths and weaknesses, and what unique things do we have to contribute to the global community in the 21st century? Network18 Managing Editor Raghav Bahl answers these questions in his book Superpower?' The Amazing Race Between China’s Hare and India's Tortoise.

Superpower published by Penguin Books India, is already being called as one of the most definitive books on the subject. In the race to superpower status, who is likely to breast the tape - China’s hare or India’s tortoise? China’s spectacular sweep, compared to India’s relatively mild rise, could tempt an easy answer. But history unfolds over time.

Bahl argues that the winner of the race with the biggest stakes ever might not be determined by who is investing more and growing faster today, but by something slightly more intangible: who has superior innovation and more entrepreneurial savvy and is grappling with and expanding in the most intensely competitive conditions. And, at the end, it might come down to just one deciding factor: can India fix its governance before China repairs its politics?

Speaking on the occasion of the book's launch, Bahl said, "I always had this niggling little doubt whether I had the resilience and the gumption to actually sit down and work on a 200-250 page book. So I said while this is as good a time I need to try it out and let me go and take this challenge for myself."

Full report here Moneycontrol

India captured in a billion shades

At a time when there has been a dramatic surge of interest in India, here comes a coffee table book that captures the country in all its colourful glory, chronicling its culture, heritage, plurality, ethos and its multi-dimensional progress.

Compiled by diplomat Amit Dasgupta, India For a Billion Reasons (Wisdom Tree), is driven by the growing interest in India globally, driven primarily by the prediction that by 2040 it would become the third largest economy after the US and China.

"While across the globe major economies struggled with low growth rates and continued predictions of sluggish economic performance, the Indian economy defied all expectations and consistently clocked eight percent growth with credible forecasts that a 10 percent growth rate was all within reach," says Dasgupta.

"Indian companies moved on to make Western acquisition and bit by bit, the image of India underwent a positive change."

He attributes the "newfound" interest in India "to Thomas Friedman's bestselling book The World is Flat and his popular television series, To Catch a Predator.
Dasgupta says his book "is meant for those who do not believe in tailor-made coffee table books on India".

The book is a compilation of essays interspersed with lavish amd evocative photographs contributed by writers like Atri Bhattacharya, Anita Ratnam, Anjum Katyal, Meenakshi Shedde, Harpal Singh Bedi, Rohan Mukherjee, Bibek Debroy, Tarun Basu, L.K. Sharma and several others on socio-cultural aspects of India like "Indian identity", hospitality, dances of India, music, art, craft, cinema, literature, food, sports, politics, economy, press and the trasition from tradition to modernity.

Full report here Hindustan Times

A quintessential “outsider”

Mehta had a complex story to tell as his career as a diplomat spanned tumultuous times

The Trust Betrayed - Reflections on Diplomacy and Development
Jagat S. Mehta
Penguin Books

Imagine you are sitting down at 7 p.m. for what promises to be a memorable dinner. What do you have for starter? Smoked trout fillet with celeriac remoulade and chive dressing. Then you're startled to find that poached fillet of brill with white wine sauce follows, and thereafter ballantine of salmon with warm ratatouille dressing. Of course, scintillating conversation ensues all through, over the dry white bordeaux, and soon it is 9.30 p.m. Just as you eagerly await the main course listed in the menu — braised lamb shank with root vegetables, wild mushrooms, and risotto — the dessert is served.

Enduring
Former foreign secretary Jagat Mehta's memoirs offers a feast of terrific starters but somehow it fails to lead to the main course. Once again it brings to one's mind that India is starved of top-notch political biographies by its gifted diplomats. Somehow the culture never quite developed. Their memoirs tend to be chatty and anecdotal, whereas they ought to have fascinating tales to tell about politics and diplomacy and can offer priceless windows to the cloistered avenues of statecraft that lie perennially closed to public viewing in our country.

K.P.S. Menon, T.N. Kaul or P.N. Haksar could have told tales of enduring value that were no less mesmerising and intellectually stimulating than Anatoly Dobrynin's or Henry Kissinger's. They strode corridors of time when a great country with an ancient past was rediscovering its baby steps on the world stage. Mehta, too, had a complex story to tell as his career as a diplomat spanned tumultuous times when India was aspiring to trot. What made him, for instance, such a quintessential “outsider”? This might sound a bit odd as he had a stellar career in the Foreign Service, held interesting assignments and ultimately rose to the top of the heap in the Indian foreign policy establishment to the absolute envy of many in his peer group.

Full review here Hindu

The Sino-Indian enigma

This book tracks the course the two neighbours have traversed over the past 60 years

China and India are widely seen as the rising powers set to steer the U.S.-dominated international arena towards Asian ascendancy in this century. Indians, however, concede that China has forged far ahead of India on a whole gamut of indices — economic, social, military, space, science and technology. Comparisons may be odious, but they must spur the trailing competitor on. The two countries were, more or less, on a par when they set out on their different courses six decades ago. India is not aiming to catch up with China as a global heavy-weight, but rather to consolidate itself as a benign regional power with global influence.

A collection of 34 essays, this book tracks the course the two neighbours have traversed over the past 60 years. Apart from reminiscences, it offers scholarly appraisals — historical, sociological, and economic. China's youth and women and Chinese settlers in Kolkata are in focus in separate papers. The essay on university students by Ravni Rai Thakur is revealing for the light it throws on middle-class aspirations to status and freedoms. Chinese nationalism figures prominently, but so do corruption, inequality, urbanisation, and class privilege. Some of the articles grapple with the troubled relationship between the two countries (tellingly conveyed by the books' subtitle, “Neighbours Strangers”) and speculate on their linked future.

Among the contributors are some well-known names like K.P.S. Menon, K. Subrahmanyam, Subramanian Swamy, and Vikram Seth. Menon's Epilogue to his Twilight on China (1972) and Seth's account of desert-baked Turfan, Xinjiang — from his delightful travel book, From Heaven's Lake (1984) — are republished. The rest are special to this issue of India International Centre's Quarterly.

Full report here Hindu

A passage to India

What is it about India that draws writers, painters, photographers from the West? Do they come here to find, take, imbibe something or to give away a part of their essential selves to enrich the people and the milieus they encounter here? Colin Todhunter seeks out a few seekers who have been drawn to India and lets them tell their stories.

I first visited India in 1977 via the overland hippie trail.

I was a hippie too! But many hippies ended up on drugs or in ashrams seeking enlightenment, when there were all these poor people suffering from hunger and illness. In Varanasi, I saw many people affected by leprosy. Though the cost of treatment was minimal, they could not afford it.  I had money for sightseeing in India for six months, but these people just needed eight euros for treatment.

I was on the point of going home because I just couldn't stand the situation. I promised myself that I would come back to help those people. The idea was to return to take photographs to sell in exhibitions back home. So that’s what I did. The first show was a great success, and, because of it, my first photo-book was published.

With the profits from my various visual art projects, I sponsored people in two leprosy colonies in Indore and Khandwa, and that's where the idea of establishing an art school originally came from. I raised 5,000 euros and wanted to use it in the best possible way. I was really touched by people who had leprosy because the were not only ill, they were outcasts too, discarded by their families and villages. But they possessed a certain brightness. This is what coaxed the idea of the art school – for them to express their beauty, not their pain, because there was so much beauty within them.

For me, India is the most diverse place in the world. In many ways, it is the opposite of western culture, and India forced me to question and develop my own view on life. I was fascinated by Indian philosophy, especially the Bhagavat Gita, which I have read almost daily from 1978.

But I don't really believe in borders or nations. For me, it's a question of humanity. I don't have a fixed personal goal and don’t follow anyone or anything. I just let things come to me. All I want to do through my visual art projects, and I include Bindu Art School here, is to strip away illusion, eliminate untruth and show how love can change people. There is no ulterior motive behind what I do. I can’t forget people's pain and just wouldn’t be happy if I didn't help.

In some respects, life in India is as everywhere else. There is an increasing concern with income, attachments and so on. So, I am aware that it is heaven and hell in one. I could stay in India forever, if I had to, but I am always happy to return to Austria with its fresh air, water and green fields. East or west, home is best. Colin Todhunter, writer, born in the UK

Full report here Deccan Herald

REVIEW: Indian Essentials

REVIEW
Indian Essentials
Penguin
Rs 450
Pp 526
ISBN: 9780143065265
Paperback

Blurb
In this quirky collection, twenty writers and social commentators ponder the mysteries of the Indian psyche and try to make sense of one trait, phenomenon or cultural value that is quintessentially Indian. From the Indian male’s predilection for public urination to the Indian female’s obsession with gold, from the jhatkas of Bollywood to the melas of Allahabad, from our embarrassingly frank matrimonials to our obsession with sex (or rather not talking about it!), nothing is spared scrutiny. And because we Indians like a little something extra over and above what we are promised, in The Short Dictionary of [Other] Things Indian, a concise guide to Indianisms, there are the peculiar Indian qualities. Dip into this collection to find out what it means to be Made in India.

The way we are Tribune India
The reviewer has decided that she’s going to follow Jerry Pinto on Twitter or whichever social network he is on, since the time he had her chuckling over his little compilation of terms most Indian, which comes in the form of an extra booklet along with Indian Essentials.

That’s a cunning trick, by the way, because the size of Indian Essentials can daunt the reader who is now used reading only about 30,000 words, give or take a few. But the slim little book grabs you and when you put it away singing Vicco Vajranti Ayurvedic cream, twacha ki raksha kare antiseptic cream, (Because Jerry Pinto, henceforth, the reviewer’s Twitter hero, asks the reader to, you see), you reach for Indian Essentials, hoping that its going to do the glossary justice. The view is a bit lop-sided, I admit, but the glossary is so vastly amusing that the expectations rise.

And the reader is not disappointed. Dare she go non-intellectual and say that the book is "lovely?" There! She’s said it! It’s a lovely book, amusing, touching the core and revealing the reality of the pure Indian spirit, but sweetly, gently, with humour and compassion. The Indian love for tradition, the hypocrisy, the family feeling, the smoke curtains around sex, the NRI phenomena, Bollywood, cricket, marriage `85 everything is dissected, put under the microscope, thoroughly examined and then sewn up neatly by the authors of this anthology.

The list of authors packs quite a punch. All heavyweights in their respective fields, they have varied views, experiences, and spheres of influence. That’s why each piece, though the surmise(s) is not new, is treated with a fresh perspective. For example, in Hum Log, the Sex Log, the writer, Samrat, writes about the obfuscation of sex issues in India, but with what different angles! He covers everything from the immensely popular porn website Savita Bhabhi to ‘Ask the Sexpert’ sections of magazines answering questions in their half-baked manner; divine procreation in mythologies, and the ‘V.D, Sex specialists’ who promise that the suffering man will regain his "virility and masculine vigour". The article is no-holds-barred irreverent and rip roaring hilarious!