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Category: Excerpts

Game India- An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

India may widely be acknowledged as one of the fastest-growing major economies in the world, but how can this vast, diverse and heavily populated nation sustain growth prospects? Game India offers a decisive answer.

Through chapters, at once ambitious and engaging, it outlines seven key unrealized opportunities India can pursue to remain a leading player on the world economic superhighway.

Here is an excerpt from the book!

Everybody likes stories. They are what we grew up with, what we turn to when in doubt. Stories are the beginning of all thought. One of the triggers for this book too lies in a story, narrated to a large gathering by the late Nani Palkhivala — eminent jurist, management guru and tax consultant.

For those who were young in the 1980s, Nani Palkhivala was iconic. He was such a lofty legal luminary, he was almost an institution. But he was renowned for yet another unique contribution. Every year, about a week after the budget papers were presented to Parliament, he would deliver a much awaited, much-eulogized speech — his critique on the budget. This was a time when there were no private television networks in India. Doordarshan, the sole master of the airwaves, was reluctant to telecast views critical of government policy.

So those who wished to benefit from Palkhivala’s views had no choice but to attend his public discourse.

Palkhivala would pore over every clause and sub-clause of the budget and deliver his appraisal of the government’s plans and intentions. His views were revered; almost every corporate baron, tax consultant, finance manager from all over India— even students—thronged to listen to him. Such was his hold over people’s imagination that most flights from all major Indian cities to Mumbai (it was Bombay then) were filled to capacity a couple of days before and after the date that Palkhivala had chosen for the delivery of his evaluation. Palkhivala continued this ‘free’ contribution to the nation year after year till the late 1990s when age made him give up this practice. That he made a deep impression on me would be an understatement. I owe a great deal of my understanding of India’s economy as well as my vision for the country to his thoughts and analyses. That is why it is not surprising that the inspiration for this book comes from one of the ubiquitous tales he told in the course of one of his speeches, a story that is as relevant today as when he first narrated it.

When God decided to create man — a version goes — He made a clay image of Himself and then put it into the oven to bake. Impatient, yet excited about creating this creature, God took the clay model out of the oven rather quickly, for fear that it would get burnt. He was in for a shock. The creature was half-baked! Yet conscious that He couldn’t undo what He had already created, He breathed life into the clay model. And man was born. Not exactly as God might have wished him to be, but marvellous nonetheless.

So God gave his creative efforts a second chance. He made another clay model of Himself and put it into the oven to bake. Now, He told himself to be patient, to wait. Finally, after a great deal of time, He pulled the creature out. This time, the being was burnt ebony black—extremely beautiful, but still not quite what God had in mind. As before, the Lord imparted breath to this creature as well.

Then, God decided to make one final attempt. He crafted a third clay model of Himself. This time He took care that it would bake for neither too long nor too brief a period. At the precise moment when He believed that it was perfectly done, God extracted this model. Glowing a rich brown, it looked stunning—and exactly as God had hoped he would be!

So thrilled was God that He began bestowing qualities on His latest creation. ‘You shall be wise, creative, adventurous, hard-working . . .’ A few more adjectives were just waiting to trip off his tongue, but before he could utter them, the white and the black creatures rose in unison and shouted, ‘God, stop!’ God looked at them incredulously. Pointing accusing fingers, the two castigated Him roundly. ‘A God is supposed to be impartial. He has to be fair. He should bestow His gifts on all.’

Realization struck God. They were right. Instead of being balanced and just, which was His essential nature, He had got carried away. But, what could He do? He could not take back what He had already given. As He wondered and worried about just how to right this wrong, an idea struck him. ‘I know,’ God said, ‘if I cannot erase what I have already given the brown man, let me at least restrict him with a handicap.’ Then he broke into a twisted smile and softly murmured, ‘I shall give him the Indian government.’

Weaving together industry lore, keenly analyzed data, and one-on-one interviews with corporate moguls-from Verghese Kurien and the Pais of Manipal to Gautam Adani and Brij Mohan Munjal- Game India is essential reading for every Indian looking ahead.

I Owe You One – an excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

The irresistible new standalone from Sophie Kinsella is a story of love, empowerment and an IOU that changes everything . . .when a handsome stranger in a coffee shop asks Fixie Farr to watch his laptop for a moment, she not only agrees, she ends up saving it from certain disaster. To thank her, the computer’s owner, Sebastian, scribbles her an IOU  – but of course Fixie never intends to call in the favour. That is, until her teenage crush, Ryan, comes back into her life and needs her help – and Fixie turns to Seb.

Soon the pair are caught up in a series of IOUs – from small favours to life-changing debts – and Fixie is torn between the past she’s used to and the future she deserves.

Here is an excerpt from chapter three of Sophie Kinsella’s new book, I Owe You, where she talks about Ryan Chalker!

I don’t know how many times a heart can be broken, but mine’s been shattered again and again, and every single time by Ryan Chalker.

Not that he’d know it. I’ve been pretty good at concealing my feelings. (I think.) But the truth is, I’ve been in love with Ryan pretty much solidly since I was ten years old and he was fifteen and I came across him and Jake with a group of boys in Burger King. I was instantly fixated by him. How could you not be fixated by him, with that blond hair, that profile, that glow?

By the time I joined secondary school, Ryan and Jake were best friends and Ryan used to hang around our house every weekend, cracking jokes and flirting with Mum. Unlike every other boy in that year, he had flawless skin. He knew how to style his hair. He could make our school uniform look sexy, that’s how hot he was.

He had money, too. Everyone whispered about it. Some relative had left him a small fortune. He always hosted parties and he got a car for his seventeenth birthday. A convertible. I’m twenty-seven years old and I’m sure I’ll never own a convertible. Ryan and Jake used to drive around London in it, roof down, music blaring, like a couple of rock stars. In fact, it was Ryan who introduced Jake to that posh, flash, hard-partying set. The pair of them used to get into the kind of clubs that you read about in tabloids, and would boast about it at our house the next day. When I was old enough, Mum let me go out with Jake and Ryan sometimes, and I felt like I’d won the lottery. There was such a buzz around them, and suddenly I was part of it too.

Ryan could be genuinely kind as well. I’ll always remember one evening when we went to the cinema. I’d just broken up with a boy called Jason, and a bunch of his friends were behind us. They started to laugh at me and jeer, and Ryan whipped round before anyone else could, and lashed into them. People heard about it at school the next day, and everyone was saying, ‘Ryan loves Fixie!’

Of course I laughed along. I treated it like a joke. But inside I was smitten. I felt as if we were connected now. I kept thinking, ‘Surely we’ll end up together? Surely it’s meant to be?’

There were so many moments over the years when I thought I had a chance. The time in Pizza Express when he kissed me lingeringly on greeting me. The time he squeezed my thigh. The time he asked if I was single at the moment. Dad’s funeral, when he sat with me for a while at the reception and let me talk endlessly about Dad. At my twenty-first birthday party he sang a karaoke version of ‘Don’t Want To Miss A Thing’ straight to me, while my heart fluttered like a manic butterfly and I thought, ‘Yes, yes, this is it . . .’ But that night he got off with a girl called Tamara. Over the years I watched and secretly wept as he dated what seemed like every girl in West London and never looked my way.

Then, five years ago, he moved to LA to be a movie producer. An actual movie producer. You couldn’t pick a more glamorous or unattainable job. I’ve still got the business card he gave me before he left, with an abstract logo and an address on Wilshire Boulevard.

It would have been easier to forget him if he’d disappeared for ever – but he didn’t. He flew back to London all the time and he always came to see Jake, in a blast of light and excitement. His wavy blond hair was permanently sun- bleached. He had endless stories of celebrities. He’d casually say ‘Tom’ and I’d think, ‘Tom? Who does he mean, Tom?’ And then I’d suddenly realize he meant Tom Cruise and my heart would be gripped and I’d think, ‘Oh my God, I know someone who knows Tom Cruise ?’

 

The Shape of the Modern Sea – an Excerpt from ‘Unruly Waters’

Posted on by Penguin India

Asia’s history has been shaped by its waters. In Unruly Waters, historian Sunil Amrith reimagines Asia’s history through the stories of its rains, rivers, coasts and seas – and of the weather-watchers and engineers, mapmakers and farmers who have sought to control them.

Looking out from India, he shows how dreams and fears of water shaped visions of political independence and economic development, provoked efforts to reshape nature through dams and pumps and unleashed powerful tensions within and between nations.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter, titled The Shape of the Modern Sea.

Looking down from orbit, the lens of a NASA satellite lands upon this patch of Earth. In the upper half of the picture lies the curve of a Himalayan mountain range, fringed by the iridescent lakes of the Tibetan plateau.

The satellite picture is a snapshot of a single moment on October 27, 2002. But there are layers of history embedded within it. It shows us the outcome of a process that unfolded in deep time. Approximately 50 million years ago, the Himalayas were created by the collision of what would become the Indian peninsula, which had detached from Madagascar, with the Eurasian landmass. The island buckled under the edge of Eurasia, pushed up the Tibetan Plateau, and eradicated a body of water later named the Tethys Sea. “Geology, looking further than religion,” E. M. Forster wrote in A Passage to India, “knows of a time when neither the river [Ganges] nor the Himalayas that nourish it existed, and an ocean flowed over the holy places of Hindustan.”

Volcanic activity under the Indian Ocean kept the pressure up, forcing layers of rock to crumple under the Indian margin to create the largest mountain chain on Earth.

So massive are the mountains, so heavy is their concentration of snow, ice, heat, and melting water that they shape Earth’s climate. Asia’s great rivers are a product of this geological history. They flow south and southeast, and they have shaped the landscape that is visible here: the force of the rivers descending from the mountains eroded rock, creating the gorges and valleys. Over centuries the rivers have carried silt and sediment from the mountains; they have deposited them along Asia’s valleys and floodplains to sustain large human populations. Writing in the 1950s, guided by maps and not yet by satellite photographs, geographer Norton Ginsburg described Asia’s “mountain core” as the “hub of a colossal wheel, the spokes of which are formed by some of the greatest rivers in the world.”

And then your eye comes to rest on what was invisible to the satellite but is now superimposed—evidence of a more recent history lies in the borders that dissect the rivers, their shapes governed by bureaucratic, not environmental, logic. Within the frame of this image alone, the mountains run through southwestern China, Nepal, Bhutan, and northeastern India. The rivers are more unruly; they spill beyond the frame of the photograph. From mountain peaks flow ten great rivers that serve a fifth of humanity—the Tarim, the Amu Darya, the Indus, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, the Yangzi, the Yellow River, and, at the heart of this photograph, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. The Himalayan rivers run through sixteen countries, nourished by countless tributaries. They traverse the regions we carve up as South, Southeast, East, and Central Asia; they empty out into the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea, the South and East China Seas, and the Aral Sea.

Look at the left of the picture and you can see a more compressed history. The haze of pollution that hangs over North India is a composite “brown cloud” of human-produced sulfates, nitrates, black carbon, and organic carbon. Aerosol concentrations over the Indian subcontinent are the highest in the world, especially in the winter months when there is little rain to wash the skies clean. Individual particles remain in the atmosphere only for a matter of weeks, but cumulatively the cloud lasts for months—what we see here is a fleeting archive of every domestic stove, every truck and auto-rickshaw exhaust pipe, every factory smokestack and crop fire that burned across the Gangetic plain after the end of the monsoon rains that year. But the location of the cloud, and its contributing sources, testify to a longer twentieth-century history of population growth, urban expansion, and uneven economic development through that belt of northwestern India. Over time, a constant succession of transient “brown clouds” may have attenuated rainfall over South Asia over the past half century, transforming the water cycle that binds the clouds, the mountains, and the rivers.

Finally, look at the snow on the mountain peaks visible from outer space. The time horizon this gestures toward is the future. The descent of water is vulnerable, now, to the ascent of carbon. As Earth’s surface warms, the Himalayan glaciers are melting; they will melt more rapidly in the decades ahead, with immediate consequences for the flow of Asia’s major rivers—and for the planet’s climate.

In an age of climate change, Unruly Waters is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand not only Asia’s past but its future.

Get Better at Getting Better – an Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

To achieve extraordinary success, you need something other than core capabilities like analytical skills, people skills, conceptual and intuitive skills, hard work and hunger for success. Chandramouli Venkatesan identifies this as developing the capability to succeed and continuously improve that capability. He calls this the Get Better Model, or GBM-your model to continuously improve how good you are.

Here is an excerpt from his new book, Get Better at Getting Better

Success is not about how good you are; it is about how powerful and effective a model you have to improve how good you are—that model is your Get-Better Model, or GBM. The automatic  question that follows is, how easy is it to build that model? I got the answer from golf.

I am a passionate golfer. A fabulous aspect of the game is that amateur golfers can spend a lifetime trying to get better at it. Even if you set out to play for recreation, the game consumes you in no time because it is so difficult and challenging. Players practise, hire coaches and take lessons, watch hours of online content on how to swing the club better, observe the professionals on TV and try to learn from that, and so on. But in the end, I observed that despite all these efforts, most people—including myself— don’t really get better. This observation about others’, and also my own, efforts set me thinking—is getting better at golf that difficult? Could it be that getting better is more than just trying? Is it about identifying and implementing the right model of improvement?

Let’s consider youngsters who are fresh to golf. I observe these youngsters taking to the game and mastering it easily—kids of 10–12 years start learning and by the time they are fifteen or so, they are playing the game at a level I can’t manage after decades of trying. Why is getting better so easy for these kids, but so difficult for me? The obvious reason is age: they are starting at an age at which learning new skills is easy. Thereafter, it becomes progressively more difficult and can border on the impossible after the mid-thirties. This seems to suggest that if we want to get better at something, we must achieve the desired level of proficiency ideally when we are young.

What about work, then?

 We start work only in our mid-twenties, when we are already past the most effective learning phase of our life. And we have to sustain that get-better journey late into our lives, usually till our sixties. Building a model to getting better at work is crucial for you and me, but we begin that endeavour at an age when we are possibly past our best learning phase. The implication of this troubled me greatly. Did this mean we cannot easily get better at work, much like me at my golf?

The first and most obvious conclusion I reached was that yes, indeed, the best learning happens at a younger age, and it is difficult to get better at the same pace as one ages. Compare a high-achieving sportsperson who started young with a high achiever at work. A high-achieving sportsperson performs at a level of excellence and effortlessness in their sport that very few people can achieve at work. That is because sportspersons start mastering their craft at a very early age, while we start trying to master work at a much later age. Is there anyone who can claim they are as good at their job as Sachin Tendulkar was at cricket or Tiger Woods at golf or Pele at football? A Virat Kohli possibly learnt more about cricket as a teenager, between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, than I have about work in over twenty-five years of effort in my middle age.

Once I reached that conclusion, the next obvious question was ‘What does it take to get better at work?’ And as I looked around for the answer, I observed that what I saw at golf was what was largely happening at work. People were trying very hard to get better at work and mostly not making much progress.

I looked around workplaces and found that most people were committed to getting better at work. They implicitly understood that success was about continuously improving how good you were. They were trying to learn new tools and techniques, hiring coaches, mining the experiences and advice of friends, managers and mentors, attending training programmes and online tutorials and diligently reading articles in online and offline media. But similar to my disappointing progress in golf, I saw that most people were making limited progress. Efforts at improvement were made, but the results were not proportionate.

The only difference between golf and work was the lack of a reference point at work. In golf, as I laboured to get better, I could measure myself against the fourteen- year-old next to me. I could see the young kid who, just one month ago, was much worse than me, but had made so much progress that I could not hope to catch up in even a few years. However, at work, there are no such ready reference points. Our reference points are all other people like us—people in their twenties, thirties and forties—trying to get better and making limited progress when measured against the effort they make. Because we don’t have the reference point of somebody else who is getting better much faster with much less effort, we never realize that our model for getting better at work is broken. We do not see that it is an inefficient model that takes a lot of effort and produces meagre results compared to the effort invested.

If you’re interested in knowing more about how to get better and succeed in your career, be sure to read Get Better at Getting Better!

 

In a Nursing Home in Cuttack, 2018 – an excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Novoneel Chakraborty’s new novel – Half Torn Hearts – is a coming-of-age tale of three layered individuals coming in terms with their first loss, which bares the devil that we all possess but are scared of encountering and which eventually becomes the cause of our own ruins.

Here is an excerpt of the prologue of the book, titled In a Nursing Home in Cuttack, 2018

The nursing home was a small one. The patient’s disease was a serious one. She had acquired a rare skin disorder
when she had gone to help cyclone victims in one of the coastal villages of eastern Odisha. It was a village that couldn’t be located on any map of India. The patient had no family. Not any more. Except for the girl sitting beside her.

The girl sat stock-still at the same place from the time she admitted the patient to the nursing home, which was forty-eight hours ago. She murmured a prayer whenever she felt something calamitous was about to happen. Looking at the patient, the girl wondered why one failed to fathom the bond with someone until that person began slipping away. Did death sever the inner attachment to the near and dear as well? People who meant the world to us at one time, seemed like a distant memory at another. Our own reality changed its face, and a huge part of our life went into accepting that change.

The girl didn’t realize when tears began rolling down her cheeks. She brushed them away impatiently. Why couldn’t things just remain the way they were? she wondered. She swallowed a lump realizing the futility of the question. Not every relationship is about flowing together forever. Sometimes, one just takes a little bit of the other person, surrenders a little bit of oneself to the other person and then continues flowing independently, sensing those acquired bits within oneself and cherishing them always.

Soft, helpless moans broke into her musing and the girl quickly went over to the bed. She caressed her friend’s forehead. The moans grew a little louder.

‘Sister?’ the girl hollered. Nobody came. She walked out of the room and espied a nurse at the far end of the corridor. By the time they returned to the room, the whimpering had stopped. The nurse checked the pulse and then the heartbeat. And then shut the gawking eyes with her palm. The girl plonked down on the chair, knowing fully well what this meant. The nurse rushed out, saying, ‘Call the doctor. The patient in room number 9—Raisa Barua—is dead.’

The girl in the room looked at the body. She felt strangely light but broken.

To find out what happens next, grab a copy of Half Torn Hearts!

The Age Of Awakening – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Indian leaders at the time of Independence had their tasks cut out. The nation that was marred by an ugly Partition, had to be prevented from coming apart at the seams. An economic policy had to be shaped for a widely impoverished population.

The Age of Awakening tells India’s economic story since the country gained independence. It unfolds a tale of titanic figures, colossal failures, triumphant breakthroughs and great moral shortcomings.

Here is an excerpt from the book, which sheds light on the post-Independence scenario.

“India is an elaborate mix of contradictions and complexities. It is rare to find other countries in the world that embrace such an extraordinary diversity of religions, a multitude of ethnic groups, a disparate assortment of languages and a range of economic development levels in society. For these reasons, there was considerable skepticism surrounding the idea of India as a nation.

The British were especially doubtful that any unity of the Indian state could outlast their reign. A ‘Balkanization’ of the region was widely expected as soon as they left. When the renowned writer Rudyard Kipling was asked in 1891 about the possibility of self-government in India, he exclaimed,‘Oh no! They are 4,000 years old out there, much too old to learn that business. Law and order is what they want and we are there to give it to them.’

Among others, Sir John Strachey, a British civil servant who gave a series of lectures in Cambridge in 1988 that were later compiled in a book titled India, also held a similar view. In the lectures, he argued that ‘India’ was merely ‘a name which we give to a great region including a multitude of different countries’.

He pointed out that the differences among European nations were much smaller than those that existed across the Indian landscape. All the nation states that had formed in Europe arose from a shared identity of language or territory. India displayed no comparable sense of national unity. Most popularly, Winston Churchill, the formidable prime minister of United Kingdom during the Second World War, once infamously remarked that ‘India is merely a geographical expression . . . no more a single country than the Equator’.

But, against all cynical assessments of the possible establishment of an Indian state, when the country gained independence in 1947, speculations arose on how long it would stay united. With the death of every leader, eruption of new secessionist movements, or even failure of monsoons, the survival of India as a single entity was vehemently questioned. But the Indian experiment remained resilient through it all.”

Weaving together vivid history and economic analysis, The Age Of Awakening makes for a gripping narrative.

Bhagwaan Ke Pakwaan – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Bhagwan Ke Pakwaan (or, food of the gods), a cookbook-cum-travelogue explores the connection between food and faith through the communities of India. In this book authored by Devang Singh and Varud Gupta, you will find legends and lore, angsty perspectives, tangential anecdotes, a couple of life lessons and a whole lot of food.

Here is a quite simple, unique yet delicious recipe for you to try out!

CHICKEN WITH BAMBOO SHOOTS 

(Serves 4)

Past Peng’s watchful gaze, we enter the Karbi kitchen—the most sacred of domestic spaces—where the cuisine rests upon three cooking styles: Kangmoi or alkaline preparations which use ingredients such as banana bark or bamboo ash for the salt alkali; Ka-lang-dang or boiled preparations; and lastly, Han-thor, or sour preparations which dominate the cuisine.

The village traditionally uses fermented bamboo, but since it’s hard to procure and production has decreased over time, we replaced it with the canned variety and adapted the recipe accordingly.

Ingredients

½ cup canned bamboo shoots

2 tbsp mustard oil

1 tbsp ginger, finely chopped

1 garlic clove, finely chopped

2–3 red onions, sliced thinly

2–3 green chillies, sliced

1 tsp turmeric

1 kg chicken (halved chunks of legs,

thighs and wings)

½ cup rice powder

Salt to taste

∼

Wash the bamboo shoots and boil in water for 10 minutes until tender. Drain the water and set the shoots aside.

Heat the mustard oil in a pan and fry up the bamboo shoots, about 3–4 minutes.

Add the ginger, garlic, onions and green chillies. Continue to sauté until they begin to brown.

Add the salt and turmeric.

Add the chicken pieces and let them brown for 4–5 minutes, before adding one cup water.

Continue to simmer until the chicken is cooked through, 7–8 minutes.

Slowly add the rice powder, a spoon at a time, until the gravy thickens. It should have a gelatinous consistency. Serve piping hot  with rice.

 

Martyrdom

Posted on by Penguin India

Gandhi lived one of the great 20th-century lives. He inspired and enraged, challenged and delighted millions of men and women around the world. He lived almost entirely in the shadow of the British Raj, which for much of his life seemed a permanent fact, but which he did more than anyone else to bring down.

In a world defined by violence and warfare and by fascist and communist dictatorships, he was armed with nothing more than his arguments and example. While fighting for national freedom, he also attacked caste and gender hierarchies, and fought (and died) for inter-religious harmony.

Here is an excerpt from the chapter title Martyrdom from Ramachandra Guha’s book, Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World 1914-48.

When he broke his fast on 18 January, Gandhi told those who had signed the pledge presented to him that while it bound them to keep the peace in Delhi, this did not mean that ‘whatever happens outside Delhi will be no concern of yours’. The atmosphere that prevailed in the capital must prevail in the nation too.

That same evening, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed a large public meeting at Subzi Mandi, where he remarked that ‘there is only one frail old man in our country who has all along stuck to the right path. We had all, some time or the other, strayed away from his path. In order to make us realize our mistakes he undertook this great ordeal.’ Congratulating the people of Delhi for taking the pledge to restore communal harmony, Nehru said the next step was to ensure peace ‘not merely in Delhi but in the whole of India’.

Later that evening, a group of Muslims returned to Subzi Mandi, where they ‘were given a hearty welcome in the vegetable market where they [had] felt somewhat insecure’.

Monday the 19th was a day of silence for Gandhi. He spent it attending to his correspondence and writing articles for Harijan. In their daily report, the doctors attending on him said: ‘There is considerable weakness still. There are signs of improvement in his kidneys. The diet is being slowly worked up. He is still on liquids.’

Also on the 19th, the general secretary of the Hindu Mahasabha issued a statement saying that while they were relieved that Gandhi was out of danger, the Mahasabha had not signed the peace pledge, since ‘the response to his fast has been wholly one-sided, the Pakistan Government still persisting in its attitude of truculence . . . The net result of the fast has been the weakening of the Hindu front and strengthening of the Pakistan Government.’ The statement went on: ‘What we oppose is the basic policy of Mahatma Gandhi and the followers of his way of thinking that whatever might be done to the Hindus of Pakistan, Muslim minorities in India must be treated equally with other minorities. This is a policy that the Hindu Mahasabha can never accept . . .’

At his prayer meeting on the 20th, Gandhi said he hoped to go to Pakistan, but only if the government there had no objection to his coming, and only when he had regained his strength. As he was speaking, there was a loud explosion. This scared Manu Gandhi, sitting next to him, as well as members of the audience. Gandhi, however, was unruffled. After the noise died down, he continued his speech.

The explosion was the sound of a bomb going off behind the servants quarters of Birla House, some 200 feet from the prayer meeting. Inquiries revealed that a group of men had come earlier in the evening in a green car and ‘moved around in a suspicious manner’. After the explosion, watchmen arrived on the scene, and apprehended a young man who had a hand grenade. His accomplices had meanwhile fled. The man, named Madan Lal Pahwa—who was ‘well dressed, of fair complexion and of medium height’—said he was opposed to Gandhi’s peace campaign since he ‘had lost everything he had in West Punjab’. A refugee from Montgomery district, he was living in a mosque in Paharganj from where he had just been evicted (as it had been restored to the Muslims).

On hearing of the incident, Nehru came to Birla House, met Gandhi and also discussed the matter with the police.

This magnificent book, now available as an e-book, tells the story of Gandhi’s life from his departure from South Africa to his dramatic assassination in 1948.

For Abba with Love – from Shabana Azmi

Posted on by Penguin India

Kaifi Azmi’s literary legacy remains a bright star in the firmament of Urdu poetry. His poetic temperament-ranging from timeless lyrics in films like Kagaz Ke Phool to soaring revolutionary verses that denounced tyranny-seamlessly combined the radical and the progressive with the lyrical and the romantic.

Kaifiyat, a scintillating new translation of his poems and lyrics that reflect Kaifi’s views on women and romance is accompanied by an illuminating introduction by Rakhshanda Jalil on Kaifi Azmi’s life and legacy, as well as a moving foreword by his daughter Shabana Azmi.

Here is an excerpt from the foreword.

Early 1990s

He was always different, a fact that didn’t sit too easily on my young shoulders. He didn’t go to ‘office’ or wear the normal trousers and shirt like other ‘respectable’ fathers but chose to wear a white cotton kurta-pyjama twenty-four hours of the day. He did not speak English and, worse still, I didn’t call him ‘Daddy’ like other children, but some strange-sounding ‘Abba’! I learned very quickly to avoid referring to him in front of my classmates and lied that he did some vague ‘business’! Imagine letting my school friends know that he was a poet. What on earth did that mean—a euphemism for someone who did no work?

Being my parent’s child was, for me, unconventional in every way. My school required that both parents speak English. Since neither Abba nor Mummy did, I faked my entry into school. Sultana Jafri, Sardar Jafri’s wife, pretended to be my mother and Munish Narayan Saxena, a friend of Abba’s, pretended to be my father. Once in the tenth standard, the vice principal called me and said that she’d heard my father at a recent mushaira and he looked quite different from the gentleman who had come in the morning for Parents’ Day! Understandably, I went completely blue in the face and said: ‘Oh he’s been suffering from typhoid and has lost a lot of weight, you know’ . . . and made up some sort of story to save my skin!

It was no longer possible to keep Abba in the closet. He had started writing lyrics for films and one day a friend of mine said that her father had read my father’s name in the newspaper. That did it! I owned him up at once! Of all the forty children in my class, only my father’s name had appeared in the newspaper! I perceived his being ‘different’ as a virtue for the first time. I need no longer feel apologetic about his wearing a kurta-pyjama! In fact, I even brought out the black doll he had bought me. I didn’t want it when he first gave it to me. I wanted a blonde doll with blue eyes, like all the others had in my class. But he explained, in that quiet gentle way of his, that black was beautiful too and I must learn to be proud of my doll. It didn’t make sense to my seven-year-old mind but I had accepted him as ‘weird’ in any case and so I quietly hid the doll. Three years later, I pulled it out as proof that I was a ‘different’ daughter of a ‘different’ father! In fact, I now displayed it with such newfound confidence that instead of being sniggered at by my classmates, I became an object of envy. That was the first lesson he taught me, of turning what is perceived as a disadvantage into a scoring point.

When I opened my eyes to the world, the first colour I saw was red. Till I was nine years old we lived at Red Flag Hall, a commune-like flat of the Communist Party of India (CPI). A huge red flag used to greet visitors at the entrance. It was only later that I realized red was the colour of the worker, of revolution. Each comrade’s family had just one room; the bathroom and lavatory was common. Being party members had redefined the husband–wife relationship of the whole group. Most wives were working and it became the responsibility of whichever parent was at home to look after the child. My mother was touring quite a lot with Prithvi Theatre and in her absence Abba would feed, bathe and look after both my brother Baba and me, as a matter of course.

In the beginning, Mummy had to take up a job because all the money Abba earned was handed over to the party. He was allowed to keep only Rs 40 per month which was hardly enough for a family of four. But later when we were monetarily better off and had moved to Janki Kutir, Mummy continued to work in the theatre because she loved being an actor. Once, she was to participate in the Maharashtra State Competition in the title role of Pagli. She was completely consumed by the part and would suddenly, without warning, launch into her lines in front of the dhobi, cook, etc. I was convinced she’d gone mad and started weeping with fright. Abba dropped his work and took me for a long walk on the beach. He explained that Mummy had very little time to rehearse her part and that as family it was our duty to make it possible for her to rehearse her lines as many times as she needed to or else she wouldn’t win the competition—all this to a nine-year-old child. It made me feel very adult and very included. To this day, whenever my mother is acting in a new play or new film, my father sits up with her and rehearses her cues.

She participates in his life equally; at a price of course! She fell in love with him because he was a poet. However, she learned soon enough that a poet is essentially a man of the people and she would have to share him with his countless admirers (a large number of them female!) and friends. When I was about nine years old, I remember an evening at a big industrialist’s home. His wife, a typical socialite, announced in a rather flirtatious manner, ‘Kaifi Saheb, my usual farmaish, the “Do Nigahon Ka” something something . . . You know, folks, Kaifi Saheb has written this nazm in praise of me.’ And Abba, without batting an eyelid, started reciting this poem which was in fact written for my mother. I was outraged and started screaming that the poem was written for my mother and not for this stupid woman. A deathly silence prevailed and my mother said, ‘Hush, child, hush,’ but I am sure unke dil mein laddoo phoot rahe thay! Mummy took me into a corner and said that I wasn’t to take such things to heart—after all, ‘Abba’ was a poet and such were his ways—he didn’t seriously mean that the poem was written for this lady, etc. I would hear nothing of it. Needless to say, that was a poem Kaifi Azmi could never use again and that woman still hates me!

Amongst his female friends Begum Akhtar was my favourite. She would sometimes stay with us as a houseguest. In fact, Josh Malihabadi, Firaq Gorakhpuri and Faiz Ahmed Faiz would stay with us too despite there being no separate guestroom, not even an attached bathroom. Luxury was never the central concern of these artists; they preferred the warmth of our tiny home to the five-star comforts available to them. I was fascinated by the mehfils at home. I would sit up in rapt attention, not even half understanding what they recited, but excited nevertheless. Their beautiful words fell like music on my young ears. I found the atmosphere fascinating—the steady flow of conversation, the tinkering of glasses, the smoke-filled room. I was never rushed off to bed; in fact I was encouraged to hang around, provided I took the responsibility for getting up in time for school the next day. It made me feel very grown-up and included.

 

 

This beautifully curated volume brings together poems and lyrics that reflect Kaifi’s views on women and romance

Emergency Chronicles – an excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

As the world once again confronts an eruption of authoritarianism, Gyan Prakash’s Emergency Chronicles takes us back to the moment of India’s independence to offer a comprehensive historical account of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency of 1975-77. Stripping away the myth that this was a sudden event brought on solely by the Prime Minister’s desire to cling to power, it argues that the Emergency was as much Indira’s doing as it was the product of Indian democracy’s troubled relationship with popular politics, and a turning point in its history.

Here is an excerpt from the prologue of his book.

On the recommendation of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, the president of India declared a state of Emergency just before midnight on June 25, 1975, claiming the existence of a threat to the internal security of the nation. The declaration suspended the constitutional rights of free speech and assembly, imposed censorship on the press, limited the power of the judiciary to review the executive’s actions, and ordered the arrest of opposition leaders. Before dawn broke, the police swooped down on the government’s opponents. Among those arrested was seventy- two- year- old Gandhian socialist Jayaprakash Narayan. Popularly known as JP, Narayan was widely respected as a freedom fighter against British rule and had once been a close associate of Indira’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru. In 1973, JP had come out of political retirement to lead a student and youth upsurge against Indira’s rule. Although most opposition political parties supported and joined his effort to unseat Indira, JP denied that his goal was narrowly political. He claimed his fight was for a fundamental social and political transformation to extend democracy, for what he called Total Revolution. JP addressed mass rallies of hundreds of thousands in the months preceding the imposition of the Emergency, charging Indira’s Congress party government with corruption and corroding democratic governance.

was reminded of the JP- led popular upsurge in August 2011, when I saw a crowd of tens of thousands brave the searing Delhi heat to gather in the Ramlila Maidan, a large ground customarily used for holding religious events and political rallies. Young and old, but mostly young, they came from all over the city and beyond in response to a call by the anti- corruption movement led by another Gandhian activist, seventy- four- yearold Anna Hazare. The atmosphere in the Maidan was festive, the air charged with raw energy and expectations of change. The trigger for the anti- corruption movement was the scandal that broke in 2010 alleging that ministers and officials of the ruling Congress party government had granted favors to telecom business interests, costing the exchequer billions of dollars. Widely reported in newspapers, on television, and on social media, the alleged scam rocked the country. It struck a chord with the experiences of ordinary Indians whose interactions with officialdom forced them to pay bribes for such routine matters as obtaining a driving license, receiving entitled welfare subsidies, or even just getting birth and death certificates. Venality at the top appeared to encapsulate the rot in the system that forced the common people to practice dishonesty and deceit in their daily lives. Into this prevailing atmosphere of disgust with the political system stepped Anna Hazare. Previously known for his activism in local struggles, he shot into the national limelight as an anti- corruption apostle when he went on a hunger strike in April 2011 to demand the appointment of a constitutionally protected ombudsman who would prosecute corrupt politicians. His fast sparked nationwide protests, giving birth to the anti- corruption movement. An unnerved Congress government capitulated, but the weak legislation it proposed did not satisfy Hazare, who announced another fast in protest. The hundreds of thousands who gathered in August 2011 had come to show their support for his call to cleanse democracy. When the diminutive Hazare appeared on the raised platform, a roar of approval rent the air.

Meanwhile, as the newspapers and television channels reported, the ruling Congress leaders fretted nervously in their offices and bungalows, uncertain how to respond to something without a clear political script. In a reprise of 1975, it was again a Gandhian who was shaking the government to its core with his powerful anti- corruption movement, arguing that the formal protocols of liberal democracy had to bend to the people’s will. And like his Gandhian predecessor Jayaprakash Narayan, Hazare enjoyed great moral prestige as a social worker without political ambitions. Similar to the 2010 Arab Spring and the Occupy movements, there was something organic about the 2011 popular upsurge in India. The enthusiastic participants demanding to be heard were mostly young and without affiliation to organized political parties. The Tahrir Square uprising ended the Mubarak regime; the Occupy movement introduced the language of the 99 versus 1 percent in political discourse; and the Congress government in India never recovered from the stigma of corruption foisted on it by the Anna Hazare movement, leading to its defeat in the 2014 parliamentary elections.

Since then, the populist politics of ressentiment has convulsed the world. In India, the Narendra Modi– led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) devised a clever electoral campaign that used the “development” slogan while stoking Hindu majoritarian resentments against minorities to ride to power in 2014.1 We have witnessed anti- immigrant and Islamophobic sentiments whipped up in the successful Brexit campaign and Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Across Europe, a roiling backlash against refugees has reshaped the political landscape. The role of conventional political parties as gatekeepers of liberal democracy in Germany, France, Italy, and several other countries is in crisis under the pressure of majoritarian sentiments. Strongmen like Victor Orbán in Hungary, Recep Erdoğan in Turkey, and Rodrigo Dutarte in the Philippines have mobilized populist anger as a strategy of rule. They incite pent- up anger and a sense of humiliation to fuel rightwing nationalist insurgencies against groups depicted as enemies of “the people” to shore up their authoritarian power and suppress dissent.

In Emergency Chronicles, Gyan Prakash delves into the chronicles of the preceding years to reveal how the fine balance between state power and civil rights was upset by the unfulfilled promise of democratic transformation.

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