Should governments talk to Al Qaeda?

Last night I got a call from BBC Radio to participate in a radio programme (World Have Your Say) on terrorism. The question for the dabate was: Should governments talk to Al Qaeda?

The debate had started because UK's Sir Hugh Orde, who had dealt with IRA before and who is tipped to be the top police chief of London, said that it was time governments talked to Al Qaeda. The blog notes:

He could become London’s top policeman, and he oversaw the end of the IRA , so people are taking the words of Sir Hugh Orde seriously. He’s not the only prominent figure to suggest negotiating with the architects of 9/11, and numerous atrocities from Bali to Baghdad. Tony Blair’s ex Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell, thinks it’s worth a try too , as does Security Minister Lord West.

Here is the clip from the programme featuring my voice:


My point is, in addition to what you can hear in the audio clip, that if talking to the terrorists can help change the status quo, then it is not an inconceivable thing to do, as some have suggested.

And if we do that, it will change the black and white, good vs evil nature of the govt. vs terrorists equation.

It is important to understand the enemy. Much of the problem is due to ignorance--ignorance about the enemy (as well as intransigience). Ignorance leads to suspicion and suspicion leads to hatred, and hatred leads to violence. The CTRL+ALT+DELETE policy might not yield any better results, though no one is advocating a soft policy towards terrorists. It is time to press CTRL+SHIFT in terms of policy.

Fear breeds more fear. The atmosphere of fear-mongering, which is not very ethical, is not sustainable. So, talking to the other side, however morally baulking, sounds better than being continuously mired in the status quo of bullets, bombs, jehadi and military violence and death.

Nonetheless, as I have noted in my radio input, there are inherent problems with the attempt to deal with a hydra-headed (as opposed to being a monolith) and protean (amorphous?) outfit like Al Qaeda. Their grievances are international in nature and that perhaps demands a multilateral approach to the discussion (with them) that is being suggested and contemplated.

WCIT 2008

I have been absent from my blog for a while now. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, it is said. Is it true in the case of blogging?

Anyway, for those of you who have been having cardiac arrests due to my (undeclared) leave of absence, the good news is that I am back. But there is a bad news too. I might be travelling again end of this week so a few more days of abstinence (from blogging) loom on the horizon.

Now where was I? Well, I was sort of blogging but elsewhere. I was in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) for about a week covering the World Congress of Information Technology (WCIT 2008). It is the biggest event for the techies of the world--also dubbed as the Olympics of IT. The venue was KLCC.

We (my office) were the official media partners of the event and as such, I was part of the team that produced the show dailies (newspapers that are produced everyday for thousands of delegates attending the conference). In addition, I was maintaining a blog, complete with videos (check them out under Multimedia on the blog) and pictures. It was all so hectic but quite fun on the whole. I even tried podcasting and ran some trials but when the actual event kicked off, there was hardly any time to produce podcasts. Reporting, production of videos and the blog consumed all my time and energy.

The event was a great success--said to be the best ever in the history of WCIT. Among the many panel discussions, there was one that got me most excited. It was about the future of the internet. One of the panelists, a Microsoft representative, summed it up so beautifully. The internet that we have now is just the beginning, he said. It's like language has been invented but Shakespeare is yet to arrive, he said. Doesn't that make you think about the future of the net? Doesn't that sound so thrilling?

IWE: Resident writers and readers

Forgot to mention this. Not long ago, fellow blogger Monideepa sent me this piece on IWE, which appeared in a Mumbai publication. Along with some other more prominent people, she has also quoted me at length in her piece. Here is the link to the article if you are interested. Click here if you want to read the article from the start.

I guess some of the comments made in this article are interesting. What is remarkable about this piece is that it lets some new voices to sound out their concerns about what is happening in the reading and writing scene in India today.

Honest work

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the first Pakistani film to be released in India, Khuda Ke Liye. According to the reports, the film has been doing well--which is a good sign as it is supposed to be a thought-provoking film ( I have not seen it yet--will have to wait for the DVD).

Writing about the film, Tavleen Singh notes in her column in The Indian Express:

What interested me most about the film was that in seeking to show Islam in a good light, it accidentally exposes the prejudices that make moderate Muslims the ideological partners of jihadis. In painting America as the villain of our times, the prejudices against the West that get exposed are no different from what Mohammad Siddique, one of London's tube bombers, said in the suicide video he made before blowing himself up. In the video, that surfaced during the trial now on in London, he describes himself as a soldier in the war against the West: 'I'm doing what I am for Islam, not, you know, for materialistic or worldly benefits.'

In Khuda Kay Liye, the prejudices against India come through as well. The hero, when he lands in Chicago, finds that his future wife does not know that Pakistan is a country. When he tries to explain where it is geographically, he mentions Iran, Afghanistan and China before coming to India. It happens that India is the only country she knows and Taj Mahal the only Indian monument she has heard of. 'We built it,' says our hero, 'we ruled India for a thousand years and Spain for 800.' As an Indian, my question is: who is we? Those who left for Pakistan or the 180 million Muslims who still live in India? If we pursue this 'we' nonsense, we must urge the Indian Government to bring back Harappa and Mohenjo-daro and Taxila. And that is only the short list.

Pedaram sultan bood. My father was a sultan. That attitude belongs to the past. But unfortunately, some people still love to live in the past's reflected glory.

Anyway, I wanted to talk about the observations of Naseeruddin Shah, one of the actors in this film. He is India's one of the finest actors and has acted in this film. Why he chose to do this film? He gives a very honest account of it:

We were not fanatics, but I had been brought up in a very orthodox home. My mother’s only solace and source of pleasure was prayer. As children, we were all taught to read the Quran but not to understand it. I remember even then that as the maulvi interpreted the holy text, I thought it ridiculous. His interpretations were full of fire and brimstone and talk of kafirs doomed for hell. I had many Hindu and Christian friends, who I knew to be very good fellows, and I wondered why they must suffer while we Muslims, no matter what we did, would only suffer a mild purgatorial period before we were all accepted into a sylvan heaven. According to him, everything was haraam: music, watching films, wearing western clothes, shaving, drinking, growing hair above the lips.

All of this bothered me intensely. What is the azaan but music; what is the recitation of the Quran but music? Did our holy book really condemn our women to look like penguins, deformed and shapeless in uniform black? The maulvi had 13 children: how were they to be reared? That is what should have been worrying him instead of all his talk of the afterlife.

Those two pages I read of Khuda ke Liye hooked me. They expressed everything I felt about my religion and culture. It was neither devout nor dismissive. It was an argument for what I believed in. I said yes immediately.

More

Kudos for Singapore

Singapore is geographically a very small state but it carries a significance in the world that far outweighs its geography.

Singapore is like a brand which conveys certain brand values: richness, beauty, tourist magnet, cultural diversity, peacfulness, discipline, rule of law, tech savvy, business-friendly and so on. That's why the country keeps getting kudos from different quarters.

Recently, NYT columnist Thomas Friedman praised Singapore in no uncertain terms:

A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew from New York’s Kennedy Airport to Singapore. In J.F.K.’s waiting lounge we could barely find a place to sit. Eighteen hours later, we landed at Singapore’s ultramodern airport, with free Internet portals and children’s play zones throughout. We felt, as we have before, like we had just flown from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. If all Americans could compare Berlin’s luxurious central train station today with the grimy, decrepit Penn Station in New York City, they would swear we were the ones who lost World War II.

How could this be? We are a great power. How could we be borrowing money from Singapore? Maybe it’s because Singapore is investing billions of dollars, from its own savings, into infrastructure and scientific research to attract the world’s best talent — including Americans.

This article was one of the top ten most read articles at the NYT website, and it stuck around in that list for a couple of day. This kind of publicity cannot be bought with money or PR. This is real, genuine, praise and a country like Singapore deserves it and more.

There is another relevant study on this topic and I quote from it here:

Singapore emerged as the top place to work and play among university students in the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) grouping, a survey said.

More than half of the 2,170 undergraduates polled, or 54.3 percent, said they would "most like to work" in Singapore among the 10 Asean nations.

Malaysia was a distant second with 11.2 percent, followed by Brunei at 8.3 percent, Thailand at 7.1 percent, Vietnam at 4.7 percent and Indonesia at 2.5 percent, according to findings published in The Straits Times.

This is fantastic--and it shows how other nations can learn from Singapore, which has shown size really does not matter.

Oh, Bihar

A rising India is the flavour of the century but unfortunately all parts of India are not equally shining. Bihar is one such place—a province that has over 10% of India’s population. More than half of that population lives below the poverty line. The International Herald Tribune recently described it as “a state of 90 million people almost completely disconnected from the global economy”.

I was born in one of the most backward districts of such a state.

Decades ago, British writer Shiva Naipaul, the brother of Nobel laureate V S Naipaul, after his visit to Patna--Bihar’s capital—described the place as “the subcontinent’s heart of darkness”.

Perhaps that description still fits the state of Bihar. It was one of India's most mineral rich states, until a few years ago, when Jharkhand was cleaved out of. After Independence of India, as other states grew, Bihar became nearly stagnant, leading the group of India's laggard states, known as the BIMARU ('Bimaru' meaning 'sickly' in Hindi) states among the economists. The acronym Bimaru stood for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh (MP), Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh (UP).

But Bihar touched its nadir in the last 20 years or so, becoming synonymous with one of its most colourful politicians, Laloo Prasad Yadav, whose fame, for reasons both good and bad, spreads from Islamabad to Harvard. Laloo Yadav, who is now India's much feted railways minister, and his wife, Rabri Devi, were Bihar's chief ministers. Between the two of them, they ruled Bihar for close to two decades. Rabri had dropped out of school after the fifth standard and had forgotten the Devanagari script in which Hindi, India's office language, is written. She learnt to write her name in office as a chief minister. While Laloo championed the cause of the low caste dalits and the minorities, he strengthened the roots of caste-based politics in the state. Bihar's economic descent and lawlessness became unparalleled in the country.

While Laloo always claimed that the centre, meaning New Delhi, India's capital, always curtailed the budget for Bihar, thus shifting the blame of under-development to the federal powers, he himself got embroiled in what came to be known as the chara ghotala (fodder scam). In the said scam, Laloo allegedly siphoned off millions of rupees meant for cattle feed to his own account. Corruption, lawlessness, economic stagnation became the second name of Bihar. For 20 years, little good news would come out of Bihar.

All this led to many unsavoury developments, including the harm it has done to the identity and dignity of its people. "Bihari" –alluding to those who belong to this state—has become a term of insult in Indian cities, a sobriquet thrown at anyone who looks poor and rustic. In the eyes of Indians outside Bihar, Laloo's shadow seemed to loom large over ordinary Biharis and perhaps they began to see Biharis as carbon copies of a corrupt and venal Laloo. For no fault of their own, this created a sense of shame even in many middle class Biharis.

If you meet anyone from India, they would proudly declare where they came from. Not the ones from Bihar. They might not even acknowledge it, as if it were a big bloat on their CV. Civil servant and novelist Upamanyu Chatterjee, of English, August fame, once said rather pitifully in an interview, "I was born in Patna, I can't efface that from my history, it's in my passport."

Poverty, illiteracy, unemployment, crime, and criminalized politics—all these have created a vicious circle trapping the Biharis in a parallax of image and reality that is difficult to disentangle.

Land of 'unwanted' migrant workers

Driven by poverty, hordes of Biharis have migrated to other richer parts of India, especially to the metros such as Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. Today, out of a hundred million migrant workers in India, Biharis form the majority. Twenty-eight per cent of the adult male population of the state now works in projects and enterprises that stretch from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, from Goa to Arunachal Pradesh, wrote Prem Shankar Jha in Outlook (The Diaspora is Inside).

This high level of migration has sometimes engendered regional identity-based animosities in the host population against the poor migrants.

In February this year, for example, Biharis became victims of parochialism and regionalism in Maharashtra whose capital is Mumbai. They were targeted there, along with other northerners by party members of a regional political group, the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) led by Raj Thackeray. Their crime? They were migrants working in Maharashtra, coming from states such as Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. “Maharashtrians aren’t getting jobs or houses. Why shouldn’t we send the migrants back?” is their justification for this indentity-based politics.

This is not an isolated incident. Apart from Maharashtra, Biharis have also born the brunt of political action in places like Assam, Punjab and Haryana, from time to time. Commenting on the recent anti-Bihari developments, Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray dubbed the Biharis as the unwanted lots.

Not just politicians but even Bollywood actors have got embroiled in the issue. Some actors like Nana Patekar, Salman Khan and Saijd Khan support the regional party, on the grounds that such mass migration caused problems in Mumbai, even though the general Maharashtrians have long prided themselves on their peaceful coexistence with migrants. A Bollywood actor, Nana Patekar, a Maharashtrian, supporting a signature campaign to protest a police ban on Thackeray’s public speaking, reportedly said: “There may be two opinions about his method, but the issue he raises is important and linked with the rights of Maharashtrians. If that idea is wrong, then isn’t the creation of states on linguistic basis wrong? Why seek domicile certificates? Why can’t non-Kashmiris buy land in Kashmir?” However, actors like Shahrukh Khan and Rahul Bose protested this kind of violence against the people of one's own country. You are free to live and work anywhere in the country is their argument.

Aliens in their own country?

Novelist and Oxford University professor Dr Kunal Basu (Award-winning filmmaker Aparna Sen’s The Japanese Wife is the title of the film based on Dr Basu’s story that is soon to release globally) was in Mumbai when he saw the dignity of a Bihari violated. Dr Basu, who is researching for his next novel set in Bihar, sent me a poignant note on the incident: “On February 3rd, I was on my way back to my hotel from a book signing event at Crosswords bookshop in Mumbai. As we passed through Dadar, the car slowed and I saw a man being beaten up by a crowd. My immediate reaction was to dash out and come to the aid of the victim. But the driver of my car speeded up, and against my remonstrations refused to stop. The man being beaten up was a Bihari and his assailants were none other than Raj's Marathas.”

What happenend in Mumabi disturbed most Biharis in and outside of India. Jawaid Iqbal, a Chicago-based software engineer and President of Bihar Cultural Association of North America wrote to me: “The recent incident in Mumbai really shocked me. How could politics go to such a cheap level where someone would go against humanity and act with such barbarity? Just take the example of the roadside vendor whose hands were chopped off by the political goons. He had nothing to do with the Thackerys or their political ups and downs. That poor fellow was simply struggling to earn bread for his family.”

As it happens, the poor and the helpless become the first target of violence. Notes Jawaid: “Most of the sufferers are poor and weak people. Did you ever hear that IT professional from Bihar were getting tortured in Mumbai? No. Because they were needed there”.

"It is the harrassment of poor and vulnerable people," said Professor Amitava Kumar, a prominent son of Bihar, a writer and critic teaching English at Vassar College in New York

Crush the stereotype, stop the joke

"No matter what their background, educational qualifications and achievemnets, the term "Bihari" is permanently tagged to all us which unfortunately carries a negative connotation in India today," says my friend Sumit Shaw, a Delhi-based young Bihari filmmaker who has worked with BBC World Service Trust. He makes ad films and now he wants to make a documentary film on Biharis, exploring why they are the butt of jokes, and at the receiving end of violent discrimination in their own country. Like many middle-class well-to-do Biharis, he is irked with the sense of shame tagged with the identity of a Bihari.

The stereotype of a poor, illiterate Bihar, migrating to an Indian cosmopolis like Mumbai, makes Biharis easy targets of political goondaism. Biharis have become vicims of stereotyping--as in the words of Dr Kunal Basu--stereotypes are monsters that are kept alive by ignorance and by the greed of politicians, and the media savours its carcass.

"The reasons for stereotyping are obvious," says Jawaid Iqbal. "Due to media bias and our own inferioty complex. If anything goes wrong in Bihar, it comes out on front pages of newspapers and if someone from Bihar achieves something or contributes to progress it never gets covered or even if it does, it gets buried in the inside pages of the newspapers. But, honestly, we can't blame the media all the time. We are responsible as well. Why do we try to hide our identity as Biharis?"

When the dignity of a Bihari is attacked, it shocks him because he is aware of a proud legacy. At one time Bihar was at the centre stage of India. India’s first kingdom emerged in Bihar. Lord Buddha, who propounded Buddhism, got enlightenment in Bihar, and under Asoka, India’s first great emperor, the new faith of peace spread its light to South-East Asia. Bihar has the honour of developing India’s first place of global learning, Nalanda University, which is now in the process of getting revived with Singapore’s leadership. When India became independent, it was the same state that gave India its first President in Dr Rajendra Prasad. This is the place that has produced worthwhile talent, both in the past and present: Writers such as Kautilya, George Orwell (born under British Raj), Renu, M J Akbar, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amitava Kumar, Arvind N Das, Tabish Khair, Siddharth Chowdhury and artists such as Subodh Gupta (India's one of the top earning artists), Shatrughan Sinha, Manoj Bajpayi, Shekhar Suman, Prakash Jha and Manish Tiwary—all had their origins in Bihar. Today, Biharis can be found all over the world, and many of them are doing well. And yet, they find themselves humiliated or beaten up.

How can this stereotype change then? "To regain the pride and respect, we have to use our own resources," says Jawaid. "The main resource is the people. Lets encourage them to be educated. Education and economic empowerement go hand in hand."

But Prof Amitava Kumar has different view on trying to protest at the business of steretyping Biharis: "I disagree with people who fulminate about stereotyping because they are often the successful ones and don't want to be mistaken for an illiterate, uncultured person," he says. "I don't feel any need to participate in that protest. I think it is more honest to take note of, and if you are able, to help alter the really bad situation in Bihar. Asserting Bihari pride is a middle-class act. People with good means wanting a greater share of the cake. It doesn't interest me. Because the Biharis who are getting the stick shoved up their asses by the Shiv Sena goons aren't really crying for pride. They're crying for justice. Under the rule of law what is mine give it to me!"

Agrees Bihar's most well known director and producer in Bollywood, Prakash Jha, but in a different sense, who is quite optimistic about developments in Bihar. He says: "It's (Bihar's image) already changing. Economic activities are happening in Bihar, infrastructure building in on, the new governmnet in Bihar which has come in has done great things. Eventually it will be the economic and instututional activities that will make the difference. Biharis are already studying in colleges and universities outside Bihar. Once the infrastructure is there it will change. It is aready changing, we don't have to do anything."

Dr Kunal Basu also thinks that Biharis deserve respect and dignity like all other Indians, without showing any signs of success. He says, "Bihar and Biharis need no 'showcasing' of success, as with the rest of us, they deserve respect."

Bihar is everybody's problem

Whatever the feelings, the reality on the ground does not look that rosy. While the southern Indian states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka have forged ahead with their silicon valleys, industries and foreign investments, Bihar has stagnated, partly along with UP, MP and Rajasthan. The International Herald Tribune (IHT) recently reported that the World Bank lent Bihar government $225 million, but private investors have not been so enthusiastic. And in a joke of surreal proportions, economists are questioning the current Bihar government's tall claims of economic achievements (Economic Survey for 2006-07) of hitting a 16 % Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth rate, almost double the national average growth rate. How could a state, which had its GDP growth in the negative, suddenly comeback with such fantastically high development figures, they are rightly asking.

But the glass can be seen as half full as well. In a sense, aren't the migrant Biharis contributors to the success of other states, at least partially?

Perhaps Bihar’s time will come too with the right leadership and progress. India took decades to shrug off its image of the land of snake charmers until she unleashed her own army of IIT and IIM professionals and her Tatas and Mittals. And Bihar must come up, as an economically backward Bihar, with about 10 per cent of India’s population, is simply not in the interest of a booming India. India must heed to what some said in a report in The International Herald Tribune: “If you think Bihar is not your problem, it will become your problem.”

The most optimistic is the Oxford don, Dr Basu. "Make no mistakes, Bihar isn't a backward state, it's a frontline state where the battle for India's future and the battle for democracy is being waged," he says. "From Gandhi to Jayprakash Narayan, the wave has always started in Bihar then lapped up on the shores of Delhi. For the last decade it's here that the caste armies have met their match, where large landowners have seen the fear of daylight struck into them, where violence has been met with resistance."

Meanwhile, I am asking my friend Sumit to make that film on Biharis—it might prove to be a little step in clearing the cobwebs of parochialism in the country.

An edited version of this article appears in today's Singapore newspaper, The Weekend Today.

A new blog

A little news to break. I have started a new blog on wordpress. It is called Techlightenment.

I did not choose the name. The credit goes to one of my creative colleagues.

BTW, I have found wordpress to be quite cool.

The new blog is on technology. You can say it is my official avatar. In that blog, I look at the human and social side of information technology and science in general.

Do check it out. The latest post there is on blogging in Bollywood. Does it interest you?

Also wrote a piece on the blogging boom in Asia:

When Dilbert predicted that everyone will be a reporter in the future, he was not wide off the mark. That was in 1997 when Scot Adam’s The Dilbert Future came out.

Fast forward to 2008. Almost everyone has become a reporter. Look at the number of blogs and micro-blogs (Twitter accounts) today. Or count the number of people making wiki entries.

Not sure? Here are the numbers. Technorati tracks nearly 70 million blogs on a daily basis. 120, 000 blogs are being created every day. Wikipedia recently reached a milestone of 10 million entries, surpassing the 42,000 of its online competitor, Encarta.

All this writing and posting online is not just pure fad. There is some money attached to it too. In 2006, the total revenue for the top 50,000 blogs was US$500 million.

More

A big spot of bother

I came across this brilliant article in the NYT Why Bother? on climate change and what we can do about it.

I think the way the climate is changing (rising temperatures, melting of the polar ice and rising sea levels) and the impact we are seeing on the global food production patterns (droughts causing a food crisis) is nothing short of a calamity. I think we are already into the third world war. An expert recently said in a report in a Singapore paper that the food crisis is more dangerous than terrorism. The Economist calls it the silent tsunami, and it has some figues to support its claim.

The magazine also says that elsewhere, the food crisis of 2008 will test the assertion of Amartya Sen, an Indian economist, that famines do not happen in democracies. Let's not talk about democracies and get distracted here.

But what are we doing about it (compared to what we are doing about terrorism)? Hardly anthing. We are just going on as usual. It's business as usual. People are increasing their carbon footrints. Evermore number of people are travelling in jets (Travelling has become so plebian, Naipaul has said). In the developing economies, as the ranks of the middle class are increasing, people are eating more meat and buying more cars, burning more fossil fuels. Tata's Nano car will contribute to it.

Even developed countries are adding to their energy consumption bills. A small country like Singapore, for example, has increased its electricity consumption by 78% between 1995 and 2007. The reason: Greater ownership of electronic appliances and gadgets. In 1998, about 58% of households owned an air-conditioner compared to 72% in 2003.

The people in the developing countries say, those who had never tasted the pleasure of creature comforts, never owned a car before, never had a lavish lifestyle (conspicuous consumption) will complain that now that it is my turn to have fun, you are talking about climate change to spoil it. I don't give a damn. Let me have my fun. Fair enough, one could say.

But does it mean the onus of bringing the earth temperatures down lies with the people of the developed world alone?

People in the developed countries are aware of this expectation but will this realisation save any trees. The writer of the Why Bother? piece says it succintly:

Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?

Gandhi said that there is enough for everyone's need but not enough for everyone's greed in his planet. All faiths teach us the lessons of parsimony and contentment. Greed creates its own problems and we are seeing the outcome now.

Paul Krugman, in his recent column, Running Out of Planet to Exploit, asks:

Last week, oil hit $117. It’s not just oil that has defied the complacency of a few years back. Food prices have also soared, as have the prices of basic metals. And the global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven’t heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth?

Won't it?

So what can be done? While the responsible amongst us can change our light bulbs (thanks to Al Gore), grow our gardens, eat less meat or travel in public transports, the governments need to intervene with rules as they do while tackling terrorism (most people need rules to stay in the queue, for the greater common good). For example, penalise for excess use of energy. Why should petrol be subsidised in poorer countries to enable people to drive cars? In Singapore, petrol is about $2 a litre, nearly same as a 1 litre bottle of packaged drinking water. Does it make any sense? Make things better. For example, make public transport (an unconvenient truth?) convenient and sexier. Better still--encourage telecommuting to work.

One hope is digital nomadism (is it hope or will it be our only choice?). It will cut travel costs. Ensure less need for office spaces. But sure enough, it will need greener gadgets too. So, green IT is good.

The man and the myth

In my office, I ofter discuss Naipaul with one of our editors. He also likes Naipaul's works and we agree that there are very few writers left like him in the world (It was he who sent me this gleefully written I-told-you-so type of piece by Paul Theroux when I was in Sydney. Have you read it?)

What we don't agree with is what he did to his wife and the kind of sexual life he led. On my part, I tend to empathize with what Naupaul has gone through. Could he write as freely and as brilliantly as he did without making those visits to the brothels in London or having a sexual companion or a paramour? Didn't he need a release of his sexual urges when none might have been available to him (remember, his wife was ailing)? These visits apparently, when revealed in a magazine interview, hurt his wife Patricia the most, hurtling her down to the abyss of sadness and early death from cancer.

Everyman fashions his own morality and Naipaul chose his own. Primarily that's his business. But now that it has come into public debate after the biography's publication, we have been forced to discuss it.

This is my theory on the matter.

Naipaul was not a rock star or a film personality. I guess a serious and brooding writer like him wouldn't have attracted a bevy of screaming girls to do whatever he wanted to do with them (If you don't believe me, ask Shekhar Kapoor). And let us say, even if he had a few of them, it would have been taxing and time consuming for him to pursue them for carnal reasons. However abominable it is, Naipaul's visits to the prostitutes would have been less time consuming and emotionally taxing for him, freeing him to devote his time and attention to writing. I guess Marquez also lived in brothels when he was young. And Ghalib was besotted with a domini. Was he doing something new and completely unheard of thing in this case? I guess not.

Another interesting review on the book.

Reviewing Patrick French's biography of Naipaul, THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS - THE AUTHORISED BIOGRAPHY OF V.S. NAIPAUL, Sunil Khilnani does a great job of analysing the work:

The result is gripping, magnificent—a triumph of the biographer's art. Patrick French's book peers unblinkingly at the dark, destructive energies that have sustained Naipaul's creativity. It counts and counts again the human—womanly—cost of Naipaul's drive to make himself and his work, and yet fully accords him, as a writer, his due.

It is not easy to make sense of Naipaul's life and work. Sprawled across four continents (the Caribbean and South America, England, India, Africa) it spans the eras of colonial rule, the struggle against that rule, the early decades of nationalist hopes and the brutal subsequent betrayals. What is so striking about Naipaul is how, out of this unprecedented diversity of experience, he has created and sustained a cohesive vision of the world—turning himself in the process from a 'regional' novelist of Caribbean street life to a maker of 'global' literature. On what authority did he ground his grand perspective—the fearless dissections of anti-colonialism, the future of Africa, the Muslim world—of civilisation itself? By labouring, in his own version, to be a disciplined writer, he proclaimed his fidelity to one enterprise: pen, pad, desk; nothing else.

French, through mastery over his materials and sources, restores to the purist tableau the messy stirring life—the mess that made the myth, and the books, possible. French weaves his myth-puncturing subtly into the narrative, knocking off Naipaul's poses one by one. Here, more crudely than French would want to note them, are at least half dozen that he addresses.

The conlusion may seem harsh yet it humanizes Naipaul's achievements:

Naipaul came to perfect this stance: controlling a situation by appearing helpless, then getting others to do his bidding—while making them feel that they were doing it inadequately. In this biography, however, this method has failed him. This may be an authorised biography, but it is firmly and in every sense in Patrick French's control—and he has written a superb account of the life, as what it is. Now, knowing the myth, having read the life, one goes back to the work. That is Naipaul's monument. We are many, who lead less than exemplary lives; but very few are able to turn the matter of their lives into great work. Naipaul, as Patrick French lets us still better see, is one of them.

More

For God's sake

Khuda Ke Liye. For God's Sake. This Pakistani film is making waves in India and abroad:

Of all the flattering headlines that greeted the release this month of the first Pakistani film shown in India in four decades, one stuck in the mind of its director, Shoaib Mansoor.

“We didn’t know that Pakistan had such good houses,” the headline said, Mr. Mansoor recalled in an interview here.

It was a striking reminder of how little people in India know about their neighbors across the border.

For 43 years no Pakistan-made film had been distributed commercially to movie theaters in India until the opening here of Mr. Mansoor’s movie, “Khuda Kay Liye” (“In the Name of God”). That absence has contributed to widespread ignorance in India about contemporary Pakistan, a country set apart by such entrenched political hostility that few Indians have visited it.

The release of the film, which broke all box office records in Pakistan last year, was hailed here as a significant moment in the slowly progressing India-Pakistan peace talks.

More

O Kolkata!

Though I always go to my hometown in northern India through Delhi, this time I wanted to chart a different route: I wanted to go via Kolkata. The temptation was to make a brief stopover in that great city before moving on to my final destination, a little known small town in Bihar.

I had been to Kolkata once before. Then, I was just a gawky high school kid and the memories of that visit had faded over the years. More than a decade later, time’s myriad illusions had stirred the desire to see the “City of Joy” once again; the urge to experience this city as an awakened adult was simply overwhelming. I had seen and vicariously experienced the city through so many Hindi and Bengali films.

One night I landed with my wife at the Netaji Subhash Bose International Airport, despite knowing that a madly hot May was not the right season for visiting Kolkata. Its humble airport welcomed the weary travelers who, while fighting off the midnight yawns, were still trying to come to terms with the spartan ambience after having experienced the flashy Changi airport in Singapore. The immigration queue was not very long but the loquacious officers took their own sweet time, asking a number of relevant and irrelevant questions. “Welcome to the land of argumentative Indians!” I told myself. I felt I was home.

As we ambled off to the baggage claim area, a number of people, most probably the airport staff, came forward to help us with the trolleys. They were wearing official identity badges. “You need a trolley, sir?” one of them asked. I got suspicious as I saw trolleys lined up near the carousel. Since when was the airport staff supposed to help passengers with trolleys? Saying “no thanks” with a polite smile, I helped myself with a trolley, and carried on with my luggage. We chose to declare nothing at the customs (green channel) as we were not carrying anything contraband or beyond the prescribed limit, though I was apprehensive if the customs officials would want to see my camcorder or laptop receipts. I was well prepared in any case.

After exiting the arrival hall, I exchanged some dollars at a lousy rate. Moments later, heat and anger began to go north in my head. Since I had booked the hotel room from the next day only, we were supposed to spend the night at the airport. I looked around the airport lounge, bought a bottle of mineral water of a dubious brand, helped myself with a cup of coffee, and got tired all right within half an hour. Morning was still a couple of hours away. Though we had been advised not to venture out of the airport past midnight, I began to think of ways to get out from there to the comfort of a hotel room. My hotel was about an hour’s drive from the airport. Going there now was out of question. I had to find a quick alternative for spending the night comfortably.

When I shared my harmless thoughts with the shopkeeper who had sold me the overpriced water bottle, he pointed me towards the airport manager. A portly man in his late 40s, the manager readily agreed to help me. He made a phone call and asked me if I was ready to pay about a thousand rupees for a night. “How is this place?” I asked him.

“Don’t worry, it is a good place to stay; sometimes, even I stay there,” he said with a wink, assuring me of proper comfort. And I thought I heard him say, “Even I have a stake in there.” While I was lost in the world of indecisiveness, his voice nudged my senses awake. “If you say yes now, they will send you a cab in five minutes,” he added, his betel juice-smeared lips curling into a question mark. Like all good-natured Indian husbands, I demanded a minute from him to confer with my wife.

Ten minutes later we were inside a Maruti van. Unobtrusively, while I conferred with my spouse, the manager had managed to squeeze in one more unfortunate shelter-seeker, an academician from some northeastern state university. We could do nothing but practice tolerance in this matter. Notwithstanding my wife’s protests, I had opted for this deal, and now in the dead of the night while the taxi maneuvered through the deserted roads of Kolkata’s suburbia with a stranger as a co-passenger, I was muttering obscenities to myself. It seemed as if I had invited myself to a nice mugging session in the city of ploy.

After about fifteen minutes of rash driving, the taxi pulled over in front of a three-story building in a godforsaken cul-de-sac. One look at the building and I thought, “Gosh, who would know if we were to be killed here.” However, I reigned in my negativism to face the bellboy–receptionist duo of the hotel. The 20-something bellboy, who surprised me with his Bhojpuri-stained Hindi in the Bengali heartland, picked up our bags. The receptionist, a boy barely out of his teens, made me sign on a register. “You know the rate here, right?” he asked. “Yes, I do,” I said. “The manager told me.”

I got our luggage inside the room. The room was homely with a double bed, a wardrobe, and a dressing table. The attached bathroom had a noisy exit fan. The air-conditioner and the television worked fine. We started preparing to retire for the night. Next morning we had an overpriced breakfast from the hotel’s kitchen. The quality of the food was not better than that of the typical roadside eateries but considering it the taste of India, we gave it our best shot, only hoping that our digestive powers would be strong enough to support this assault. After paying the bill, we hired a taxi and started for the next hotel in Kolkata’s heart.

This journey, from the suburbs of Kolkata to its heart in Park Street, dashed all our romantic dreams about the city. What we had in our mind was the elegance of a city that we had seen in films like Jagte Raho and Do Beegha Zameen. Though we had seen the more contemporary Ronald Joffe’s City of Joy, we believed the city depicted in the film was the inner city, the poverty-ridden slum side of Kolkata. We were sure that there would be a counterpoint to that, a more contemporaneous twenty-first century side of it. But what we saw in those two hours, and later over the next few days, was completely heartbreaking. If one could describe it with a single underpinning motif, the most befitting would be the soot-filled benighted belly of a dilapidated cobweb-infested haveli, crumbling, dying, and in shambles. What we saw was a gut wrenching theater of human and material degradation. Even the Kolkata of my last visit, the fleeting images of the city that I had in my memory, seemed much more attractive than the one I was seeing and experiencing now. In hindsight, years ago the Kolkata I saw was still the big metropolis for me because then I was coming to her from a nondescript mofussil town in northern India. Age, experience, and travel had changed my perspective.

What we saw now was depressing: mad traffic, air pollution, decades-old public transport vehicles in various stages of decay. The majority of the people looked so miserable and tired. We hardly saw anyone smiling. There were tobacco shops every few meters, and at times, I saw many ill-clad minors (child laborers) freely smoking. Huge hoardings could be seen on roadsides. Any available white space had either political slogans written over it or some form of graffiti adorned it. The only uplifting thing visible amid all the chaos and decrepitude was the resilience of the members of the Bengali middle class, especially their womenfolk. They were able to maintain their dignity, which seemed so out of place and miraculous despite being trapped in this dystopia of squalor and despair. One of the images that has stayed with me, even after so many months of the journey, is that of a sari-clad calm young woman who was on her way to somewhere in a rickshaw, while people all around her, on bicycles and motorbikes, and in buses and three-wheelers, were howling and hollering about in a traffic jam. Her placidity, with more signs of cheerfulness than of resignation, was such a jarring sight, but it was enough to uplift our spirits.

The taxi driver dropped us at Hotel Akash Ganga. I had reserved rooms in this hotel online from Singapore. I looked at the hotel and I did not see any reason to regret my decision to stay there.

“Give me twenty rupees extra sir, besides the meter fare,” the taxi driver pleaded, breaking my reverie. When he saw the “what for?” expression in my eyes, he immediately added, “You saw the traffic sir, and you saw how with great difficulty I brought you here.” I was too exasperated to want to pick a fight with him, and so, I handed him the money and checked into the hotel.

In the next few days, to cut a long story short, whatever we saw and wherever we went, our impression about this decaying metropolis did not improve dramatically. No wonder people had been calling Kolkata a dying city. The disappointment was not about the people per se. Many of them, during our interaction, were quite civil, even gentle. The taxi drivers were not rude despite driving their old rickety Ambassador cars, except during the evenings or after nightfall; tired after a day’s work, they might refuse to go to a particular location. But they were not cheats and most charged the fare by the meter. That’s a wonderful mark of discipline and civility.

In fact, the gloom arose more from seeing the crushing poverty all around and seeing the ill-maintained buildings and pathetic civic infrastructure in the city than anything else. It seemed that Kolkata had stopped changing with the times. It felt as if the city existed in a time warp; while other cities had progressed and moved on, Kolkata with its colonial elegance had stopped in its tracks, and whatever beauty it possessed had been washed out of it over the decades.

We went through a harrowing experience in the famous New Market. As soon as we landed there, a posse of dalals (middlemen) landed on us, leading us into shops in the market, promising us to fetch the moon and get us the best bargains. Strangely, they carried empty baskets with them and wore badges. When I asked them, I was told that the empty baskets were symbols of their trade. It was so difficult to get rid of them. Even if you got rid of them, they recognized you and later would taunt you for not engaging them for your shopping.

Apart from shopping and traveling, eating was another area where we exercised caution. Most of the roadside eateries were only poorly maintained and they served passable food. Kolkata has, however, many interesting restaurants that serve excellent Bengali food. Bengali sweets are famous and are found aplenty throughout the city. Every street has plenty of teashops and cafes but sanitation is wanting except in branded cafes such as the Baristas.

The “City of Palaces” also boasts of imposing attractions such as the Howrah Bridge and the Victoria Memorial, a memorial built with Jodhpuri white marble for Queen Victoria. The latter looked so cheerless and desolate that for a moment I thought it had fallen into disuse. When we finally entered its sprawling premises—entry was free—we were not allowed to shoot with our camcorders. Moreover, a signboard announced that carrying “plastic bags inside” was banned. I was carrying two plastic shopping bags but thankfully no one stopped me. We strolled around the monument, marveling at its architectural splendor. We could also spot some young couples, locked in embraces in various poses of intimacy, on the benches by the pond or hiding behind the hedges. Lovers in all cities, be it in Delhi’s Lodi Gardens or in Colombo’s Botanical Gardens, exhibit the same behavior. Love, like death, is a great leveler. It almost always finds for itself the same physical expressions, no matter when or where.

Though Bengalis are known for their humorous banter, I could experience none whatsoever during my stay in Kolkata. Perhaps I would have experienced it had I interacted with Kolkata’s artists, intellectuals, painters, and writers. However, one funny little incident took place just a day before our return. It was early morning and I was standing near the North Eastern Railways reservation office. I was reading and deleting some old SMSes from my mobile phone when a middle-aged man, clad in kurta and dhoti, walked up to me and stood next to me, and began looking down at my mobile phone. I kept doing what I was doing for some time but at the same time this man standing next to me without any care in the world intrigued me. He stood there as if he were my friend. Running out of patience, soon I asked him, “What is the matter, man? What do you want?” He replied, as nonchalantly as one could imagine, “Nothing. I’m just looking.” Even then he did not move. He walked off, maybe disgustedly, only when I angrily pocketed my phone.

For a moment, I was annoyed by this stranger’s intrusion but was also amused at his attitude. This man, most probably a Bihari laborer, found a mobile phone such an object of his attention in this day and age in a metropolis like Kolkata! I hope he did not have any criminal motives, but this incident said a lot about the city. I had never experienced anything like this in any other city—such a thing would be normal in a rural market but not in a city.

On my way back, as I reflected, Kolkata in sweltering May came across as a city whose elites had either deserted it or who lived a secluded life in complete isolation from the city’s hoi polloi. It seemed like a city that was strewn with the half-lived lives of listless laborers and dispirited merchants. It was as if those who carried the cultural legacy of Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray had vanished into the soot-filled benighted belly of this dilapidated cobweb-infested crumbling haveli of a city.

Sidebar
Kolkata Coda: Reasons for Optimism?

“Where were the privileged Kolkatans?” I had wondered during my stay in the city. “Are they mourning for their beloved city? Or, are they busy silently shaping a new city.” I got my answer when, away from the City on the Hoohgly, I began reading newspaper reports about the rise of a new Kolkata. Salt Lake’s Sector V, for example, is bursting with 55,000 people crowding 6.5 million square feet of call centers and BPOs. A new township called Rajarhat is also coming up fast, with gleaming office towers, malls, and apartment blocks. Reports suggest that like Delhi’s fast-developing suburbs of Gurgaon and Noida, this new Kolkata’s citizens, too, have a whole new lifestyle: nightlife, 24-hour bars, and all that jazz.

The prospects look great. The West Bengal government is determined to be India’s third-biggest IT state by 2010. Tata Consultancy Services is going to grow its center in Kolkata from 7000 to 20,000 over the next three years. The government is handing out an “employment generation subsidy” of Rs. 20,000 for each recruit that an employer trains, grooms, and develops. To name just another initiative, The India Design Centre plans to get into making VLSI (very large-scale integration) microprocessors.

Ah, so Kolkata is forever.

I wish I could have also seen this new “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed” Kolkata. However, will Tagore’s rain song (Brishti pore tapur-tupur, Node elo ban, Shib-thakurer biye holo, Tin konya daan?) still sound so romantic in this new city? I doubt it, but who knows? The present-day Bengalis might have gotten tired of all this nostalgia.

Published in Khabar (April 2008), Atlanta, USA

Surfing Salman

While Salman Rushdie is back in the news for his new nubile girlfriend, a fierce battle has been raging in the lit pages of newspapers, praising or tearing apart his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence.

Here's a lowdown on the reviews so far. Good or bad. Take your pick.

But I want to talk about this particular review.

Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal did a review of the novel in Tehelka. The review was so skewed with wrong historical allusions that it made Salil Tripathi write a counter review. Quite fun:

The problem with Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal's review of Rushdie's new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is precisely that: he (Dhaliwal, not Rushdie) has trouble with history. In his world, the Mughal dynasty has its origins in the India of the 11th century, after a succession of assaults. This can only be accepted if one accepts a fairly stereotypical view — that all Muslims are alike. Indeed, India was attacked by a wide range of Islamic rulers, from the time of the invasions of Muhammad Ghori — with Iltutmish setting up the first Mamluk dynasty in 1206, followed by Khilji, Tughlaq, Saeed, and Lodhi in 1526, when the Lodhis gave way to Babar. But these rulers were as Mughal as the ones found in Hollywood.

My point here is not to provide a history lesson on the dynasties of Delhi. But it is fair to expect a critic to know beyond a broad-brush Far Pavilions or Bhowani Junction-type view of Indian history that most British students are exposed to. As a British Asian, one suspects that's the exposure Dhaliwal had. (I know a bit about this, being a parent of two boys at a London school).

Read it all here.

Welcome to the make up...

Hi, sorry, I have been away for sometime now. Have been busy working and travelling. I am currently in Sydney. So enjoy the sights with me. Will tell you more when I am back in Singapore. Tell me if you liked the pics.

Books, dating, and the French connection

This article in the NYT is so funny. Apparently, people are breaking up their relationships over Pushkin and Ayn Rand, thanks to the increasing trend of listing their favourite books on social networking sites. Read it yourself:

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

More

And this one on the French is funnier--the kind of stuff you won't find in a travel guide:

It is hard for French merchants to admit they are wrong, and seemingly impossible for them to apologize. Instead, the trick is to somehow get the offended party to feel the mistake was his or her own. I’m convinced the practice was learned in the strict French educational system, in which teachers are allowed to tell pupils they are “zeros” in front of the entire class.

A doctor I know told me he once bought a coat at a small men’s boutique only to discover that it had a rip in the fabric. When he tried to return it, the shopkeeper gave him the address of a tailor who could repair it — for a large fee. They argued, and the doctor reminded the shopkeeper of the French saying, “The customer is king.”

“Sir,” the shopkeeper replied, “We no longer have a king in France.”

More

Tribute to Arthur C Clarke

I read this beautiful tribute to late Arthur C Clarke, and the way the writer has shown his love and devotion to Arthur has moved me...so much so that I want to read some of his sci fi books now. I usually don't read science fiction, and I have only seen 2001: A Space Odyssey. But now I guess I'll dig out one of Arthur's novels or stories to read.

Here is DENNIS OVERBYE on Arthur:

In his short story “The Nine Billion Names of God,” published in 1953, Clarke wrote of a pair of computer programmers sent to a remote monastery in Tibet to help the monks there use a computer to compile a list of all the names of God. Once the list was complete, the monks believed, human and cosmic destiny would be fulfilled and the world would end.

The programmers are fleeing the mountain, hoping to escape the monks’ wrath when the program finishes and the world is still there, when one of them looks up.

“Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”

That was a typical Clarke ending, and it seemed only natural upon his death that nature might want to reciprocate.

More

Be a star blogger

Want to be a star blogger? Here are some tips and spoilers from the NYT:

1. Don't expect to get rich
2. Write about what you want to write about, in your own voice.
3. Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule.
4. Just post it already!
5. Keep a regular rhythm.
6. Join the community, such as it is.
7. Plug yourself!

More

To me, the bottomline is: Don't go into blogging to make a living, as Mark Cuban says. Do it for fun, and keep the sense of fun going.

I killed my first wife: Naipaul

This is what has jumped out of Patrick French's biography of V S Naipaul, and its shock value has appealed to the newspapers to carry as a news item:

He is regarded as one of the most sublime novelists of the age and has won both the Booker and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But in private, Sir Vidia Naipaul, 75, better known as VS Naipaul, tormented his first wife for four decades, visited prostitutes and kept a mistress for 24 years before he suddenly abandoned her to marry yet another woman.

Sir Vidia's shocking treatment of those closest to him is laid bare in a new biography that suggests he is emotionally immature, selfish and self-pitying. It also contains the author's own admission that his mental cruelty towards his wife may have killed her.

The disclosures, in the biography by Patrick French and serialised in The Daily Telegraph from tomorrow, are likely to do further harm to a novelist who already has a reputation for arrogance and rudeness that has lost him many friends in the literary world.

More

Breaking, Entering, Exiting

Bad news has not stopped coming. First Arthur C Clarke, and now the news of Anthony Minghella's death. He was only 54. The Oscar-winning film director and until recently chairman of the British Film Institute, died on Tuesday, after suffering a brain haemorrhage.

I loved Minghella's films. In fact, among the contemporary British filmmakers (working in Hollywood, the ones that I know of) Minghella and Sam Mendes have been my favourites. I thought very highly of some of his works, especially The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley, and Breaking and Entering. The last one remains vivid in my memory as I had seen it only a few months ago. There are very few filmmakers who make 'that' kind of films. He was still young. Did he deserve to go so soon? Reminded me of the sudden death of director Mukul Anand in India--he too was young and much was expected of him (mind you, I am talking about two different kind of filmmakers in totally different settings).

Here's a tribute by Ken Russell, film director:

I grew up on Minghella's dad's ice-cream in Ryde, Isle of Wight, a scoop each of chocolate and strawberry. A writer himself, he was great at adapting bestsellers. Minghella was keen to the poetry in a story. He wove spells by referencing Herodotus, Neruda, cello-playing, extravagant winds that one fought with knives and swords - as hopeless as fighting passion with social rules. “The palace of winds,” the hollow at the base of a woman's neck (The English Patient); the moments like “a bag of diamonds in a black heart” (Cold Mountain) - all of these evoked mystery, desperate longing and romance, of which he was the undisputed master.

He was the best at showing exotic locations, romantic times, glamorous lovers separated and frustrated by unavailability, guilt, war, long distance or death. He let us into a world of deep shadows and powerful passions overcoming refinement and education, an artist's world where the dialogue and location were turn-ons: Rome, Greece, Venice, the Sahara. He was the king of poetic lust...

More

How free is Indian media?

I was shocked when I recently read in the Outlook magazine that veteran Indian journalist M J Akbar had been dramatically removed from the editorship of his own paper (he was the founder editor of The Asian Age). I might be commenting a little late on it as it happened sometime in early March but the fault is not mine. I did not come across this news anywhere but in this piece by Khushwant Singh in Outlook, who has written very strongly about the state of Indian media:

The hard truth about Indian journalism is that proprietors matter, editors do not; money counts, talent does not. The latest instance of money trashing ability and experience is the unceremonious sacking of M.J. Akbar, founder-editor of the Asian Age. He is perhaps the most distinguished living member of his tribe. He started the weekly Sunday and the Telegraph for the Ananda Bazaar group of papers based in Calcutta. He has been elected member of the Lok Sabha and is the author of half-a-dozen books, all of which have gone into several editions. Fifteen years ago, he, with a set of friends, launched the Asian Age. It was a bold venture as the Asian Age came out of all the metropolitan cities of India as well as London. It had little advertising but had a lot more readable material taken from leading British and American journals than any other Indian daily. It was as close to being a complete newspaper as any could be. Besides these unique qualities it also published articles by writers critical of the government and the ruling party. It was probably this aspect of the journal that irked Akbar's latest partner in the venture; he had political ambitions of his own and wished to stay on the right side of the government. So without a word of warning, on the morning of March 1 while he was on his way to office, Akbar learned that his name was no longer on the Asian Age masthead as its editor-in-chief. It was an unpardonable act of discourtesy committed by someone with less breeding and more money.

Earlier, Khushwant Singh's son, Rahul Singh, had commented on this subject equally vociferously in The Dawn but I discovered it only later when I googled about it:

THE Indian media takes great pride in being independent and fearless, among the freest in the developing world. Indeed, the press is held up as one of the mainstays of Indian democracy. But is this really so? Take the abrupt and recent sacking of one of the country’s most distinguished editors, Mubashar Jawed Akbar.

On March 2, the erstwhile editor-in-chief of The Asian Age was on his way to his office in New Delhi when he got an SMS on his cellphone from one of his staff members, asking him to look at the masthead of his paper. To his astonishment and dismay, he found his name was missing! When he arrived at his office he was met by an editorial staff in mourning, some of whom broke down.

Word had clearly reached them of their boss’s unceremonious ouster. MJ, as he was known to his friends and colleagues, quickly emptied his drawers, said farewell to his staff and departed.

What has happenend is sad and shameful. Akbar is perhaps one of the last of a generation of mediapersons who represent a certain kind of scholarship and journalistic values.

I have been reading Akbar since his The Telegraph days. That was the first newspaper I ever read in life. Then I was in high school and could barely understand all that was discussed and reported in the paper. Later on, I saw him from close quarters when he fought for the MP seat from Kishanganj, my native town. He was an inspiration to me.

I am sure Akbar will not sit back and will rise again and do something remarkable in the field of journalism.

Agha Shahid Ali prize in poetry

"The world is full of paper. Write to me."
--Agha Shahid Ali, "Stationery"

If you are a poet, go for this:

Honoring the memory of a celebrated poet and a beloved teacher, the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry is awarded annually and is sponsored by the University of Utah Press and the University of Utah Department of English.

$1000 Cash Prize and Publication; Reading in the University of Utah's Guest Writers Series.

Last date: 31 March 2008

More