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Category: Features

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Four things you can do today to change your life from ‘The Source’

Posted on by Penguin India

Your brain has 86 billion neurons, each of them poised to drive your responses to the world around you. But is your mind focused on your deepest wishes and values – or is it running on autopilot?

Neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart is convinced that we all have the power to lead the lives we want. That’s because the things we most wish for – health, happiness, wealth, love – are not governed by mysterious forces, but by our ability to think, feel and act; in other worlds, by our brains.

From her book, The Source, we extract four things you can do today to change your life.

Set Your Intention

Law of attraction enthusiasts define ‘intention point’ as the meeting place between ‘heart’ and ‘mind’, but science shows us that there is more than just blind faith in this notion. When we set a goal from the ‘intention point’ what actually happens scientifically is that our intuition, our deepest emotions and our rational thinking line up and work in harmony rather than conflict. It’s almost impossible to reach our goals when we are out of kilter in these three dimensions.

Reframe Failure

‘Abundance’ correlates with positive thinking and generosity, with the central belief that there is enough out there for everyone, and that by carving our niche and claiming our success we will add to the realm of possibility.

One of the simplest ways to begin thinking more abundantly is to change the way you consider failure. Abundant thinkers regard failure as an essential element of success.

Visualise Your Goal

The language of self-belief and achievement is rich with visual metaphors. We ‘dream’ of doing something great or we see something happening in our ‘mind’s eye’: this is the language we use more when we are in touch with all our senses and comfortable with daydreaming and mind-wandering rather than focusing on rational thought and concrete examples only.

Visualisation works because there is surprisingly little difference to the brain between experiencing an event directly in the outside world and a strongly imagined vision (plus somethings imagined action) of the same event.

Self-Care of the Brain

The demands of modernity conspire to throw our brains into a constant state of overwhelm and stress, so The Source (i.e. the brain) needs our help to maintain its focus and maximize its efficiency. This is where changes to our lifestyle – everything from the foods we eat, number of hours each night we sleep and physical exercise we get – can bring huge incremental gains.

#DidYouKnow These Facts about the Animals in the Himalayan Region?

Posted on by Penguin India

What do we really know of the intimate-and intense-moments of care, kinship, violence, politics, indifference and desire that occur between human and non-human animals?

Whether it is through the study of the affect and ethics of ritual animal sacrifice, analysis of the right-wing political project of cow protection, or examination of villagers’ talk about bears who abduct women and have sex with them, in the book Animal Intimacies, Radhika Govindrajan illustrates that multispecies relatedness relies on both difference and ineffable affinity between animals.

Here are some intriguing facts about the diverse animal life in Himalayan region!

Pahari (literally, “of the mountain”) animals, were related to pahari people by virtue of their shared subjection and relatedness to pahari devi-dyavta. Thus, a pahari goat would understand the need for his own ritual sacrifice to a local deity in a way that a goat from the plains simply could not.

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A pahari leopard’s predation on people could, in some cases, be explained by the fact that he or she was acting on a deity’s instructions to punish recalcitrant human devotees.

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Villagers claimed a kinship with pahari monkeys on the grounds that they had both experienced displacement from their homes by outsiders. To be related as paharis, then, was to be related through a shared history of neglect and exclusion.

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An experimental pig who escaped confinement at the IVRI in the 1960s, and made her refuge in the surrounding forest is believed by villagers to be an ancestor of the wild boar who swarm these forests today.

Built on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the mountain villages of India’s Central Himalayas, Animal Intimacies explores the number of ways that human and animal interact to cultivate relationships as interconnected, related beings.

 

Breathtaking Words From Book Stalwarts!

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Do you live, breathe and eat books? Then this World Book Day, rediscover your favourite reads and go on a literary sojourn over the weekend!

Here are some phenomenal quotes that all book lovers will live by!

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” – George R.R. Martin
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee
“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” – Lemony Snicket
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” – C.S. Lewis
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss
“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” – Groucho Marx
“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.” – Oscar Wilde
“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install a lovely bookshelf on the wall.” – Roald Dahl

Jaya Prada: the Multilingual Celebrity – an excerpt from ‘Democracy on the Road’

Posted on by Penguin India

On the eve of a landmark general election, Ruchir Sharma offers an unrivalled portrait of how India and its democracy work, drawn from his two decades on the road chasing election campaigns across every major state, travelling the equivalent of a lap around the earth.

In this excerpt from his book, Democracy On The Road, Ruchir Sharma talks about Jaya Prada’s election contest against Noor Bano in the 2009 elections.

We found yet another spin on the byzantine turns of Indian alliance politics unfolding in the city of Rampur, best known for its Mughlai cuisine, lilting poetry and Rampuri chakus—the long knives once favoured by small-time villains in Hindi movies. As we often do we arranged a meeting with the DM, the district magistrate, and outside his office I noticed a wooden board listing all the previous DMs of Rampur.

The list ran long, implying that the tenure of any one DM was quite short—likely because state governments come and go so quickly, and each new ruling party brings its own roster of local officials. I asked the DM about this and he said with a wry smile that Hinduism recognizes four sequential stages of life, from Brahmacharya (student), Grihastha (householder), Vanaprastha (retired) and finally Sannyasa (renunciation). But the life of a district magistrate bounces between these stages in no apparent order, and they ‘can never be sure which will come next’.

In Rampur, Congress candidate Noor Bano, a scion of Rampur’s royal family, was plotting her comeback against the former film star Jaya Prada, whose rootless career symbolized the fluid loyalties of Indian politics. We met Jaya Prada in a luxury suite at The Modipur Hotel, itself a classically Indian mash-up of garishly colourful decoration and gold-plated religion, with miniatures of Hindu gods dotting the makeshift dining-room temple where Jaya Prada prayed.

Jaya Prada had been a coveted ally not for her Hindu piety or her caste but for her multilingual celebrity: she was the rare actress who had starred in both Telugu and Hindi films. After appearing in more than 300 movies over three decades, she became a favourite of Chandrababu Naidu and later a member of parliament representing his Telugu Desam Party in the Rajya Sabha.

Then she not only switched parties, she switched to a new state and a capital city nearly 1500 kilometres away. After falling out with Naidu she had left his party in 2004 and accepted an invitation to join Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party in UP. Milling about Jaya Prada’s expansive hotel suite in Rampur we found a mix of her relatives and their kids, Samajwadi Party functionaries and Muslim clerics—all moving around carefully so as not to knock over the Hindu statuettes.

Asked how her transition across state, party and religious lines had gone so far, Jaya Prada smiled and said, ‘AP+UP=JP’, or Andhra Pradesh plus Uttar Pradesh equals Jaya Prada, the kind of formula that could describe the hybrid backgrounds of many itinerant Indian politicians.

There were, however, signs of strife. Some Samajwadi Party members appeared to be secretly manoeuvring to tar Jaya Prada as an immoral ex-starlet, apparently as punishment for showing insufficient respect to their local party boss, the Muslim leader Azam Khan. Though Jaya Prada carried herself with cinematic aplomb, her optimistic glow did crack once—when she described these machinations against her.

She was particularly upset about photos that had surfaced online, doctored to show her in compromising poses. Leaving the interview we made our way past Bollywood movie star and Rajya Sabha member Jaya Bachchan, who had flown in to campaign for Jaya Prada and appeared quite angry that a bunch of journalists had kept her waiting.

Next we went to see the Congress stalwart whom Jaya Prada unseated back in 2004, Noor Bano, and found her dressed sari-tosandals all in pure white, but dark with resentment at losing her Lok Sabha seat to this film industry interloper from Andhra Pradesh.

Bano, seventy, pitched herself as the opposite of a ‘shifty’ ex-actress: as a daughter of Rampur royalty, she was not a migrant politician and could be relied on to remain true to the locals. Whatever progress the Rampur area had enjoyed of late had nothing to do with Jaya Prada or the Samajwadi Party, Noor said. It was all the work of the national government under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, which had done so much for farmers and the poor.

The most uplifting thing about the Jaya Prada versus Noor Bano battle was that it pitted two women against each other, in a country where women had been rising in politics but at a painfully slow rate. The number of women in the Lok Sabha had risen from just nineteen in 1977 to fifty-nine here in 2009, and we had seen how the constant struggle to command respect in a male-dominated political culture had left many prominent female leaders battle-hardened and suspicious, including supremos like Jayalalithaa and Mayawati. The one clear thing about the Rampur contest was that a woman would win, and be beaten by a woman.

Democracy on the Road takes readers on a rollicking ride with Ruchir and his merry band of fellow writers as they talk to farmers, shopkeepers and CEOs from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu, and interview leaders from Narendra Modi to Rahul Gandhi.

 

The Secrets We Keep – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

Rahul, an intelligence officer on a secret mission, is undercover at a major’s house. In the process, he falls in love with the major’s daughter, Akriti, unknowingly putting her in danger. To protect her, Rahul decides to hide her at his parents’ house. However, estranged from his family for years, he must first make amends with them.

Just when he thinks he has found a haven for Akriti, she goes missing…

Here’s an exclusive excerpt from Sudeep Nagarkar’s much-awaited The Secrets We Keep:

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If you could forget a relationship that fleetingly existed in the past, would you? If your past could be erased,
would you erase it?

Sadly, you have no choice in this matter because I—your past—am invincible.

Mysterious and unseen, I am the master of the dark and light and everything in between.

I am a force of nature, an unstoppable wave that’ll tame you by taking away every last bit of your strength until you regret ever standing in my path. A king of manipulation at its finest, I will see into the soul of the characters in this story long before they catch a glimpse, and change the way they think. I am the only God and the only devil, and I am here to destroy you because without destruction there’s no creation.

If you think you can escape me, you’re already doomed.

Grab your copy today!

Do Better with Less – An Excerpt

Posted on by Penguin India

The world faces a stark challenge: meeting the needs of over 7 billion people without bankrupting the planet. India, with its large population and limited resources, is at the very epicentre of this challenge.

Packed with over fifty case studies, Do Better with Less: Frugal Innovation for Sustainable Growth by the bestselling authors of Jugaad Innovation offers six proven principles that Indian entrepreneurs and businesses can use to co-create frugal solutions in education, energy, healthcare, food and finance that are highly relevant to India and the world.

Here is an excerpt from the first chapter:

In 1999, Jean-Marie Hurtiger, a senior manager at Renault, a French carmaker, was given what seemed like an almost impossible task. His boss, Louis Schweitzer, then Renault’s CEO, wanted him to create a modern, reliable and comfortable car that would retail at $6,000.

Two years earlier, Schweitzer had visited Russia where, to his dismay, he had discovered that the Lada—a locally made car priced at $6,000—was selling fast, while Renault’s fancier cars—twice as expensive as the Lada—had few buyers. As Schweitzer recalls: ‘Seeing those antiquated cars, I found it unacceptable that technical progress should stop you from making a good car for $6,000. I drew up a list of specifications in three words—modern, reliable and affordable—and added that everything else was negotiable.’

Schweitzer instructed Hurtiger, an engineer by training, with international management experience, to build a $6,000 car that matched these specifications.

Technically, Hurtiger could engineer a stripped-down version of a car for that price. But, like the Lada, this car would be clunky and uncomfortable, and customers would question its safety. Renault had a reputation for elegance and quality to protect; launching a shoddy product would be a form of brand suicide. Hurtiger therefore realized that what his boss was asking him to do was not just create a cheaper car,
but one that married high quality and affordability.

This ‘more for less’ proposition was at odds with Hurtiger’s long experience. R&D engineers in the West are taught to push the frontiers of automobile technology by adding features to existing products. Indeed, Western car companies invest billions in R&D to create increasingly more sophisticated products in order to differentiate their brands from do better with less competitors’ and charge customers more for the privilege. Schweitzer’s ‘more for less’ proposition seemed to flout the conventional ‘more for more’ business model that had proven so lucrative in consumption driven Western economies over the previous five decades.

Both Hurtiger and Schweitzer recognized that they would first have to change the way Renault employees think. Creating a $6,000 car required not just a new business model, but a new mental model. This would amount to an immense cultural shift in a company that was over 100 years old and for decades had designed high-quality cars—some for the premium market—primarily for Western middle-class consumers. All Renault’s French engineers had grown up in a resource-rich and relatively stable economy with a ‘bigger is better’ R&D philosophy. Schweitzer and Hurtiger needed a new breed of engineers, with a different outlook, who could innovate under severe constraints and turn adversity into opportunity.

Do Better with Less is India’s guide to claiming global leadership in frugal innovation.

Evocative Lines from ‘Mouth Full Of Blood’ that Reshape our Worldview

Posted on by Penguin India

Spanning four decades, the essays, speeches and meditations in Mouth Full Of Blood interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender and globalisation. The sweep of American history and the current state of politics. The duty of the press and the role of the artist. Throughout Mouth Full of Blood our search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Toni Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence.

The collection is structured in three parts and these are heart-stoppingly introduced by a prayer for the dead of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King and a eulogy for James Baldwin.

Here are some powerful lines from Toni Morrison’s book that will leave an imprint on you!

“Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice or rights or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.”

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“The fall of communism created a bouquet of new or reinvented nations who measured their statehood by ‘cleansing’ communities. Whether the targets were of different religions, races, cultures – whatever – reasons were found first to demonize then to expel or murder them.”

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“If education is about anything other than being able to earn more money( and it may not be about any other thing), that other thing is intelligent problem-solving and humans relating to one another in mutually constructive ways.”

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“For if education requires tuition but no meaning, if it is to be about nothing other than careers, if it is to be about nothing other than defining and husbanding beauty or isolating goods and making sure enrichment is the privilege of the few, then it can be stopped in the sixth grade or the sixth century when it had been mastered.

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“Biology and bigotry are the historical enemies – the ones women have long understood as the target is sexism is to be uprooted.

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“Complicity in the subjugation of race and class accounts for much of the self-sabotage women are prey to, for it is straight out of that subjugation that certain female- destroying myths have come.”

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“I am alarmed by the violence that women do to one another: professional violence, competitive violence, emotional violence. I am alarmed by the willingness of women to enslave other women. I am alarmed by the growing absence of decency on the killing floor of professional women’s worlds.”

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“I have never lived, nor have any of you, in a world in which race did not matter. Such a world, a world free of racial hierarchy, is frequently imagined or described as a dreamscape, Edenesque, utopian so remote are the possibilities of its achievement.”

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“The defenders of Western hegemony sense the encroachment and have already described, defined and named the possibility of imagining race without dominance, without hierarchy, as ‘barbarism’; as destroying the four-gated city; as the end of history – all of which can be read as garbage, rubbish, an already damaged experience, a valueless future.”

Mouth Full of Blood is a powerful, erudite and essential gathering of ideas that speaks to us all.

 

 

 

 

 

Bite-sized wisdom from Sadhguru

Posted on by Penguin India

A motley bouquet, the articles that comprise Flowers on the Path offer insights from Sadhguru that spark you with their incisive clarity, delight you with humour, or even render you in profound stillness within.

Whether the subject covers social issues and worldly affairs, individual challenges, or dimensions of the beyond, Sadhguru’s ability to delve to the root and look at life in all its totality is evident.

 

Health Is Wholeness

 

Life Afresh With Children

 

 Rising Beyond Religion

 

Mind: The Dumping Ground

 

Dynamic Stillness, Static Stagnation

 

The Snakes and Ladders of Comfort

 

Spiritual Allergy

 

Choosing Your Destiny

 

What We Are Not

Front cover of Flowers on the Path
Flowers on the Path || Sadhguru

As a flower can confound you with its brilliance and beauty, so too does each article in Flowers On The Path  hold the possibility to confuse you out of your conclusions, and pave the way towards true knowing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kim Wagner on New Discoveries while Writing ‘Jallianwala Bagh’

Posted on by Penguin India

The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 was a seminal moment in the history of the Indo-British encounter, and it had a profound impact on the colonial relationship between the two countries.

In Kim Wagner’s Jallianwala Bagh, which takes the perspectives of ordinary people into account, the event and its aftermath are strikingly detailed. Wagner argues that General Dyer’s order to open fire at Jallianwala Bagh was an act of fear and its consequences for the Indian freedom struggle were profound. Situating the massacre within the ‘deep’ context of British colonial mentality and the local dynamics of Indian nationalism, Wagner provides a genuinely nuanced approach to the bloody history of the British Empire.

In this piece by the author, he talks about his learnings while writing and researching for the book.

As I was writing the book about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, one of the things that struck me was the abiding belief in the benevolence of the British Raj on the part of the local residents of Amritsar. Above the entrance to the memorial there is today a sign that says: ‘A Landmark in Our struggle for Freedom’, and the events of April 1919 are often referred to as a key moment in the independence movement that came to its fruition in 1947. In this narrative, the hundreds of civilians who were massacred by General Dyer, were martyrs to the cause of an independent India and it is as such that they are today commemorated. The interesting thing is that no-one in Punjab in 1919 even thought of independence.

Indian nationalists at the time, such as Drs Kitchlew and Satyapal, were thinking exclusively in terms of dominion-status within the British Empire – similarly to Australia or Canada. Despite the socio-economic dislocation and hardship caused by the First World War, the global flu pandemic, high food-prices and failed crops, the disappointment of the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms and the anger caused by the Rowlatt Act, the population of Amritsar never lost their faith in the Sarkar, or British Government.

As locals sought to petition the authorities for the release of their two leaders who had been deported on 10 April, they did so using the terms Ma Bap – the traditional supplication entailed by the line ‘You, My Lord, are my mother and father!’ After the confrontation turned violent and stones were thrown at the military pickets, who responded with indiscriminate shooting, people were shocked that the British would open fire on ‘innocent’ people. That is also why crowds twice sought to cross the railway bridges leading from the old city of Amritsar and into the Civil Lines, and twice were fired at.

As late as 13 April, local residents maintained their faith in the British Government whom they believed would ultimately act in a benevolent and righteous manner. Shortly before Dyer arrived at Jallianwala Bagh with his strike-force, a British airplane flew over the city and when people in the crowd became restless, the Satyagraha activists, who had organised the meeting, reassured them: ‘We need not fear anything. The Sarkar is our father and mother: why should Government kills its own children.’ While Dyer mistakenly believed that he was facing an armed crowd of rebels, and therefore opened fire to prevent a second ‘Mutiny’, people in the crowd did not see themselves as engaging in anything unlawful. The ban on public meetings had not been widely disseminated in the city and there was widespread confusion as to the actual nature of the meeting at Jallianwala Bagh, which furthermore coincided with the festival of Baisakhi.

The massacre, and its aftermath, brutally disabused Indians as to the true nature of British oppression and it was from April onwards, as a result of what had occurred, that people more generally began to think of independence. Before any details of what had occurred in Amritsar reached beyond Punjab, the poet and writer Rabindranath Tagore famously returned his knighthood at the end of May 1919, stating that: ‘The enormity of the measures taken by the Government in the Punjab for quelling some local disturbances has, with a rude shock, revealed to our minds the helplessness of our position as British subjects in India.’ It was not, however, till the following year that Gandhi initiated the non-cooperation movement and finally took up the cause of independence.

The Amritsar Massacre has since been recognised as a crucial watershed in the history of British India, and the in the freedom struggle, yet it is important to remember that this was far from evident to the people involved at the time. It was not till 1947 that the events of 1919 could be seen as the beginning of the end of British rule in India.

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When it comes to British contemporary perceptions of the ma

Of Marxists and Mamata – an excerpt from Ruchir Sharma’s ‘Democracy on the Road’

Posted on by Penguin India

On the eve of a landmark general election, Ruchir Sharma offers an unrivalled portrait of how India and its democracy work, drawn from his two decades on the road chasing election campaigns across every major state, travelling the equivalent of a lap around the earth.

Here is an excerpt from Ruchir Sharma’s book, Democracy on the Road that talks about the power packed campaign led by Mamata Banerjee in May 2011.

Leading the opposition charge was Mamata Banerjee, a Bengali Brahmin who split from the Congress to form her own party in 1998 and had been railing against Marxist ‘tyranny’ for years, mostly to no avail. The Tata conflict, and a second deadly government attempt to acquire agricultural land in and around Nandigram in the district of Purba Medinipur, had given Mamata’s campaign against Marxist rule new momentum and credibility.

We saw Mamata for the first time at a rally in Kolkata, where she sprang out of the helicopter and race-walked past party supporters, a big boss in a diminutive frame, dressed austerely in a white sari with a blue border. Her bearing broadcast immediately that she had no time for the usual campaign greetings; she was a one-woman dynamo running a lifelong crusade, eager to topple communism yesterday.

A poet herself, Mamata promised not only to restore English instruction but also to bring back the poetry of Bengal greats such as Rabindranath Tagore and Kazi Nazrul Islam, and the stories of Bengal heroes like ‘Binoy, Badal and Dinesh’, which the Marxists had expunged as too bourgeois, and replaced with party-approved literature. While English is an aspirational language all over India, perhaps only in Bengal could a politician campaign on promises to restore local poetry to the school curriculum.

She promised that under her All India Trinamool Congress (TMC)—the ‘party of the marginalized’—things would be different. Bengal would have modern schools, colleges and health clinics, with no proof of party loyalty required for access. Non-party members would no longer have to travel out of state for medical treatment. Her campaign slogan promised ‘poriborton’, the Bengali spin on ‘parivartan’ or change. As interesting as what Mamata said was what she didn’t say. Neither the Congress nor the BJP had cracked 7 per cent of the vote in recent Bengal elections, and they hardly bore mention in Mamata’s speech. The caste and religious undercurrents that drive much of Indian politics barely surfaced either, since Bengal was divided mainly between Marxist party members and everyone else. Tapping popular frustration with thirty-four years of Marxist rule, Mamata’s party won in resounding fashion, taking 184 of the 294 state assembly seats, and she became the new chief minister. The Marxists finished a distant second….

Economic growth had picked up at least moderately since the communists departed. Infant mortality was falling. Construction was booming all over the capital, spilling into the outskirts. Amit Mitra, state finance minister under Mamata, told us investment was flowing into cement and fertilizer plants, small- and medium-size companies were growing rapidly and that Tata had begun to expand again in the state.

When Mamata came to power in 2011, she had fired police officials who did not toe her party line, and harassed critics who posted mocking cartoons of her on social media. She was seen as erratic, volatile, an autocrat who brooked no challenge within her own party. Mamata’s writ still ran large, but she was settling down and opening up, as the Marxists fell into disarray. During the last campaign, Mamata had refused to meet us because some of our companions had ties to leading Marxists in Delhi, but this time she called them up to the stage before a Kolkata rally and greeted them warmly.

As Mamata went on the offensive there were flashes of the old paranoia, and over the course of the campaign she would attack everyone from Modi and the media to the Election Commission and the security apparatus for conspiring against her. Her crowds lapped it up. As soon as her Kolkata rally ended and Mamata made it past her security cordon, she was mobbed by supporters, young and old, who wanted to kiss her hand, touch her feet, or receive her blessings.

Over this five-week campaign, Mamata would claim to walk 1000 kilometres in the sweltering heat of April and May to address more than 160 meetings, and while the numbers were implausible, her energy and her centrality to the TMC were not in question. The joke in Kolkata was that ‘there is only one post in the TMC and Mamata holds it. Everyone else is a lamppost.’ She was running a highly centralized government in which her word was the only one that really mattered, yet she was delivering enough to ordinary people to win them over. Many said Mamata had executed on her promises to improve roads and electricity. She had offered subsidies to bring down the price of wheat, vegetables and rice, which were selling for a few rupees per kilo. She had also given free bicycles to girls as an incentive and means to get to school, and offered wedding subsidies to young women.

In the end the TMC won easily. After five straight terms under Marxist party leaders, Bengal may simply not have been ready to throw out Mamata after one. Her personal charisma prevailed over the imploding Marxists and their opportunistic alliance with the Congress. She had mellowed, growing open enough to industry to win business support, remaining generous enough with the public purse to win votes from the poor.

Mamata was also riding the growing wave of voter support for single leaders, whose unmarried status seemed to confirm their claims of all-in devotion to public service. Among India’s twenty one most populous states, there were no unmarried chief ministers in 1988, but by 2016 there were seven, including Mamata, seemingly lifted by growing voter distaste for nepotism inside political parties, and the corruption that flows naturally from running parties as a family business. Mamata had in fact remained far more ascetic in her personal tastes than many other supremos. Even as chief minister she lived in her small ancestral home in the Kolkata neighbourhood of Kalighat. Passing by the home we were stunned to see it in a state of decay with a dilapidated grey tiled roof and rotting bamboo shafts—a stark contrast to the sandstone palaces Mayawati had built for herself in UP. Mamata’s image as a single leader with no taste for diamonds had made her largely impervious to the corruption charges that so often topple Indian governments, and helped her secure this second term.

Democracy on the Road takes readers on a rollicking ride with Ruchir and his merry band of fellow writers as they talk to farmers, shopkeepers and CEOs from Rajasthan to Tamil Nadu, and interview leaders from Narendra Modi to Rahul Gandhi.

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