An Indian who made us proud

 An Indian who made us proud

(Written in September 2012)

Some days ago a 90 year old man passed away.  A legend, who created national institutions, and who made us feel proud of being Indians.

Twenty years ago (April 1992), while my parents were confined to a hospital in Ahmedabad after a horrific road accident, my wife and I got away for a day to visit her alma mater at Anand.  IRMA was an institution that Verghese Kurien had created, and we spent a pleasant morning there, with my being shown around a well-maintained campus, and my wife being warmly greeted by her professors and invited into their houses, while I tagged along.  

But the high point of our visit was in the afternoon, when we went to the Amul Milk Plant.  We were met in the lobby by a young man, who welcomed us warmly, but told us that we would have to wait at least an hour (or more) for a tour of the plant.  Meanwhile he had to accord priority to another group.   This Very Important Party turned out to be a busload of village women, children and a few men,  the families of the Milk Producers who gave life to Amul.  The shareholders.  I was delighted.   Here was a place where we English-speaking, non-resident rootless cosmopolitans (*) had to make way for those who were the real stars of the Amul show.  Among all the wonderful things about Amul and Dr Kurien with Tribhuvandas Patel and HM Dalaya, this was another little gem.

Our young host, concerned about our having a long wait ahead of us, asked if we might be interested in joining the group, but warned us the tour would be in Gujarati.  We agreed immediately, and attached ourselves to this excited crowd.  While the gleaming machinery and the processes of pasteurization and churning and dehydration etc were interesting to see (at least to the vestiges of the engineer in me), it was far more fascinating  to feel the thrill in the air, to observe the excitement of the children on their tour of a local version of Willie Wonka's Chocolate Factory.  Here they were with their parents and aunts and uncles, rushing to see the tins of powdered milk being sucked up a chute, sealed and dropping down another before being stamped, wrapped and packed.  I don't think I have heard a happier sound in our country than that of the women chattering excitedly as they observed the journey of the buffalo milk which they had supplied, through the various vats and tubes and tins and packs, transformed into a variety of dairy products and sent on their way to market, to market.

--

[(*) in '92, I was an NRI, and had lived more years of my adult life abroad than in India; Hindi didn't trip off my tongue easily any more, so I was indeed  at that time a "bezrodniy kosmopolit"]

If I were a Carpainter

Outside a market in a south Delhi locality is a signboard announcing the services of a handyman.  “Car panter”, it reads, leaving us guessing whether he  carries a hammer and saw or a spray painting kit.

M F Husain and his painted Fiat.

I was perhaps 5 when I first met M F Husain, well before he had become hugely famous, though by then he was a local celebrity in Delhi.   It was at the house of our dear family friend, the well-known architect Mansinh M Rana.  Husain was a close  friend of the Rana’s, and was often at their house.  He was a gaunt bearded man with a big smile, shabbily attired and without footwear.  He used to come in his Fiat Millecento, which was painted in his imitable style, different colours on each side.   We children were welcome to tumble in and out of the car.

Mansinh Rana in his living room.

Mansinh Rana had an endearing trait of befriending everyone — from the famous and powerful to the young.  I was his special friend.   On his birthday (September 1), we would always be at his house.   It was perhaps 1967 or 1968 that on his birthday Husain gave him a wonderful canvas.   Innocent that I was, I too pulled out a watercolour of a windmill I had made for my dear Rana mama (on the card sheet that comes in the packaging of shirts), with a “I too have made a painting for you”.  Everyone had a hearty laugh, and Husain, with a twinkle in his eye, ruffled my hair calling me "the little painter”.  

Abettor of Verses

In the summer of 1987, when I was still a graduate student in the US, I was visiting my parents in Delhi.  My father came home one evening, beaming and eager to share with us the highlight of his day: that Salman Rushdie has visited him in his office.  The awkward relationship that the writer had had with Indira Gandhi was a thing of the past, and he seemed to have gotten along reasonably cordially with her son and political successor.   Rushdie had chatted for quite a while with Shouri in his office, talking of many things.  One theme that was discussed was censorship and under what circumstances the government would ban a publication.  Shouri said he had told him that in his understanding of Indian polity, the government would always place the maintenance of law and order over the freedom of speech of individuals. 

I was to recall this reported conversation a little over a year later, when I was back in the US, and the storm over The Satanic Verses broke. The Government of India soon banned the commercial distribution of the book.  

I had already bought my hardcover from The Book of the Month Club, and since I was travelling to India at the end of the year, decided to buy a second copy for my father.  I was taking a small risk in carrying the book into India, since import of the book was prohibited.  The argument that I had prepared in my defense, in case the book was discovered in my bags, was that it was not a crime to possess it, and I hoped to get away any unpleasant harassment at the Customs by indulging some discreet name-dropping.   None of these were necessary since I sailed through the green channel unhindered.   

When I unpacked my bags at home and somewhat triumphantly produced the book to give to Shouri, he quietly said thanks but he had already read it.  And then walked slowly over to a bookshelf and pulled out his copy.  When I flipped it open, I noticed the library stamp of the Prime Minister's Office, and looking up saw a twinkle in his eye and a wicked little smile flash across his face. 

The Cultural Vista

(Cartoon by RGJ --  Richard Graham Jolley)

(Written in London, 5th June 2018)

Yesterday I spent an afternoon at the (British) National Portrait Gallery just off Trafalgar Square and St-Martin-in-the-Fields. A vast collection of paintings of royalty, nobility and their hangers-on. Vile creatures, bold creatures, some ugly and some surprisingly handsome (Milton!) The collection abounded with bounders and adventurers who had built the empire. Many of those whose faces we saw hanging there had lost their heads. Literally.  
And then there was the unabashed, unapologetic portrayal of the colonists as heroes. Clive, Wellington, the whole lot of folks whom we would arraign as war criminals today. But the more redeeming part of the gallery was the large number of portraits of poets, painters, artists and scientists. The people who made the British empire much much richer than a Brutish Empire.  
Wandering around the gallery, I was reminded of my father’s dream for the Central Vista in Delhi. I think this idea had been in his head ever since the 50s, when he first visited Washington DC: after all the Vista is modelled after Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant’s plan for the Mall there.  
From what I recall, his vision grew out of a concept where the cultural heart of the nation grew around the intersection of the Raj Path and Jan Path down to India Gate. Now that the new republic had democratised the two roads from being King’s Way and Queen’s Way (*), and the (roughly west-side) area from Jan Path up to Rashtrapati Bhavan ceded to the political life of the nation, the part (roughly) to the east could be devoted to the Cultural Nation.  
The National Museum had already come up on Janpath, next to the Archaeological Survey, and from the 70s and well into the 80s, it was to grow under the vision of scholars such as Sivaramakrishnan and dynamos such as Laxmi Sihare. Nonetheless he chafed under the mealy objections of bureaucrats unwilling to give more space to a much larger museum, such as the one that Sihare had envisaged.  
On the other side of Raj Path, the National Archives had long been established, and the new parliament libraries served to record the political developments of our democracy.
My father saw the C-Hexagon as the natural location for a series of museums for the arts and sciences. The buildings were palaces of the princely kingdoms, and could be repurposed. Jaipur House had already become the National Gallery for Modern Art, though the gallery space would soon clearly become inadequate. While the buildings carried the legacy of the princely states, their very names could serve to highlight the notion that this was a national project: Hyderabad, Patiala, Jaipur, Bikaner,...
He was for pulling down the unsightly little bungalows in Prince’s Park and reclaiming the ugly barracks of Raksha Bhawan to develop a National Portrait Gallery comprising mainly photographs and a few selected paintings focussing on the great singers, artists, scholars, writers (with a slightly less important but unavoidable space devoted to politicians). On the other side, he saw the need for a National Landscape Gallery to document the extraordinary variety and beauty of the land and sea of India. The defence services of course were loth to give up any land.
My father had earlier influenced the inclusion of a larger set of exhibits documenting the various strands of the Freedom movement (from the 1750s to 1948) in Gandhi Smriti, but that exhibit had been dismantled and destroyed at the insistence of the Gandhians (during Morarji-bhai Desai's tenure as PM) who wanted it to be exclusively a museum to Gandhi. (The space has been occupied by tawdry tableaux and ersatz objects). The corresponding scholarly record in documents about the freedom movement fortunately survived in the Nehru Memorial Library (despite efforts to make it exclusively a mausoleum to Nehru). However, this is now under severe threat, but, hell, from the Other Side. 
He also talked of the need for National Centres for the Performing Arts (Dance, Music and Drama) off the central vista, each with a carefully designed auditorium suited for the particular art forms -- apart from NCPA in Bombay -- and distinct from the various auditoriums around Mandi House. The auditorium at Siri Fort, though, was to him an exemplar of what an auditorium should not be -- poor acoustics (I remarked how one could hear distinct echoes when Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic played there), and a relatively small lobby, where the entire audience could not be accommodated without jostling. And the preposterous positioning of the lavatories.  
In the 80s and early 90s, my father got to see part of his vision realised. He was involved in a very intense way in the setting up of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. This came up on the northern side of the Central Vista, and was meant to house all the folk arts, both visual and performance, as well as our rich linguistic heritage. Kapila Vatsyayan has done a stellar job in giving this project a scholarly vision, although this enterprise suffered a rather rude disruption in the late 90s-early 2000s. The building, a large and expensive project, when it did come up disappointed him for the sheer lack of large exhibition space. My father had worked with Charles and Ray Eames, and from them had learnt the importance of space and light in exhibitions and for the movement of people through them. 
There is a small group of people who want to preserve the Lutyens Bungalow Zone, seeing it as a buffer against ugly modernity. I think my father concurred only slightly with them... he did not favour “a more efficient use of the space” for large office buildings or sarkari housing, but did not think that the bungalows had any intrinsic architectural value. This view of his probably gained even greater resonance when he was delving through the papers of Edwin Lutyens when writing a book about the Rashtrapati Bhavan (Rashtrapati Bhavan: The Story of the President's House, Publications Division), where he found that Lutyens in fact detested bungalows and PWD construction, and use to refer to them as “Bungle-Oh”.
(*) A friend of mine waggishly remarks that it is somehow apposite that Rajpath and Janpath are forever at cross purposes.
Postscript 5 June 2025: With the huge "redevelopment" of the Central Vista in 2020 onwards, this vision cannot be realised. Sarkari Delhi has expanded with more government buildings coming up along both sides of what is now been renamed Kartavya Path (so now, the people and duty are at cross purposes). The old Government houses, North and South Block are supposed to become museums -- to what, one is not very sure (perhaps more officially blessed tacky-tawdry displays) ... and access will likely be harder, given that security will be reluctant to let people in so close to the Rashtrapati Bhawan.

Dismal Points

 «The cut-off for candidates for qualifying the JEE Main Session 2 Paper 1 is from 100 to 93.1023262»

7 significant digits! Our first class in Chem 101 at IITK ended with a quiz where we had to do some questions of the kind

7.2+0.0002= ____ .

You got it wrong if you wrote 7.2002. (BTW, Meta AI first suggested 7.20002 and then when I ignored that, suggested 7.2)

For an IIT professor who has worked there for over 3 decades (and who has headed one of the most sought-after departments), I have kept myself blissfully clear of the setting of JEE papers and the admission processes (other than -- many years ago -- being part of invigilation oversight teams).

I am not sure what the JEE really tests for these days, especially when it is conducted as a exam that employs Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs). While analytical abilities and some conceptual knowledge are tested, it is not clear whether this correlates well with the ability to synthesise good programs, proofs, or engineering systems that solve real-world problems. Negative marking only makes it harder to sift the imaginative from those who have been through a coaching process where pattern-matching skills are perfected. Even a nodding acquaintance with the Pigeon-hole Principle should convince us that the scores given to us by the JEE process would have several students earning the same marks, with ties broken using convoluted formulas so as to rank students according to a total order. (I continue to wonder why Indians are so quick to seek an immutable rank order in almost every examination process).

Perhaps one should not read too much into JEE results other than seeing the test as a filter that measures to a modest degree the preparedness of a student for engaging with undergraduate education offered in an IIT. For that purpose, no significant digits after the decimal point are really needed.

The other chief virtue of the JEE, as I see it today, is that it is competently administered, and that it has over the years largely kept itself free of the taints that afflict many of our public higher educational institutions. (I am, of course, aware of the small-minded manipulations over the selection some years ago that my whistle-blower friend Rajeev Kumar has tirelessly crusaded against). This "objectivity" enables us within the IIT system to get on with teaching our classes without having to worry about endless litigation on whether someone was unfairly denied an opportunity of studying at an IIT.

Six decades is perhaps a long enough period to develop a testing methodology, such as ETS has done over the several decades, on the basis of which one can develop a test the outcomes of which correlate well with something other than being able to perform well on such tests.

Books read in 2025

Orbital (Samantha Harvey, 2024)

I started the year finishing a book I started in the last days of 2024, the absolutely brilliant short novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey which had won the Booker Prize.   I hope I will have time to reread the book -- it is so exquisite, and has the virtue of being just 136 pages.  

Windfall (Desmond Bagley, 1982)

When we were teenagers, the genre my friends and I enjoyed the most were a class of thrillers written by (mainly British) authors such as Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley, featuring resourceful heroes pitted against villains (MacLean would use the phrase "the ungodly").  Such books were common in the lending libraries that children of professional middle-class Indians living in cities could access in the 1960s and 1970s.  Very occasionally a school library would buy them, perhaps because some teacher thought it was better that children read such thrillers rather than not read at all.  Also, each of us would also somehow manage to buy a few novels of this kind from our pocket money --  they were commonly available in bookshops in those days, certainly in Khan Market.   And especially in the bookshops or stalls at train stations, not just the Higginbothams of our times but even in those little carts that vendors plied on the platforms.  

Then there would be the usual frenetic exchange of such books within our circle of friends -- you were expected to return them within a few days, a week at the most.  Friendships could come unstuck if you broke that compact, taking too long to return a book or comic, or horror of horrors, losing it.  There was a constant fear of comics being confiscated by a parent, but not such books.   No one would anyway believe you lost it -- you were deemed unreliable thereafter.   And you would have to be a real idiot to take them to school and have them confiscated there. 

Bagley was a journalist and thriller writer who wrote books such as The Golden Keel, High Citadel, The Vivero Letter, The Tightrope Men, The Freedom Trap (which was filmed as The Mackintosh Man) and The Snow Tiger.  Windfall (1982) was the last thriller published while he was alive.  I saw this book in the library of the Delhi Gymkhana Club, a paperback that the library had had bound in a red hardback with the title and author's last name imprinted in gold lettering.  I immediately  picked it out since I was curious to revisit the kind of books I read nearly 5 decades ago, and  see whether the writers of this genre had any real quality to their writing. Beyond entertainment.   

I cannot say that this particular book by Bagley was remarkable for its writing.  The action in this novel is set mainly in Kenya, with some sequences in Los Angeles, New York and London.  Having lived in Africa, and travelling there, Bagley had some feel for that continent's terrain, vegetation and people.  He also has a good sense of geopolitics in the African context, with the characters commenting on the realities of borders. tribal and political allegiances in East and South Africa. This being the 1980s, the main baddies in the novel were the white South Africans.  The main protagonist Max Stafford (British) runs a security agency after retiring as a colonel in the British military intelligence -- there is nothing particularly charismatic about him.  Some of his collaborators and associates have capabilities that are a bit exaggerated. [There also are some odd names -- a Sikh called Nair Singh and a minor character called Natterjee, who is said to be a Parsi.  But hey, this was Kenya, and names could get transcribed differently there.]   The descriptions of the colonial clubs and colonies in Nairobi and hotels there and further into the bush sound reasonably authentic. A lot of cold beer and some gin is drunk by all (Nair Singh drinks juice or lassi though).  I got to learn a charming phrase for speed-breakers on the road: "sleeping policemen".

The Secret Hours (Mick Herron)

Mick Herron, creator of Slow Horses, is one of my favourite authors today.  Yes, yes, the comparisons with John Le Carré will be inevitable, but Herron has created some most memorable characters such as Jackson Lamb, Diana Taverner, Molly Doran and others.  He also has the ability to coin memorable phrases, not all of which can be repeated in polite company. 

The Secret Hours is a stand-alone novel, set in the present but with the past and a foreign country.  It has action happening in the present, and you can somewhat recognise a former PM.  It also has an interlaced deposition about actions from the past that cast long shadows.  I don't want to give away the plot, but characters from the Slow Horses series do appear, sometimes in the background (such as the Old Bastard). Diana Taverner as First Desk is one of the main characters in the present, together with others such as a retired academic and two civil servants.  The real story however is a remembrance of times past, a couple years after when the Wall came tumbling down.

Seeing (Jose Saramago)

An election takes place on a rainy day in the capital.

The Vegetarian (Han Kang)  (Translator: Deborah Smith)

An amazingly written and somewhat terrifying book about a Korean woman Yeong-hye who decides to become completely vegetarian following a bloody and brutal dream.   This abrupt and resolute decision (which follows an earlier decision to not wear a bra) and its sequelae are described in haunting prose, chronicling the protagonist's dramatic mental and physical deterioration in a series of grotesque events. The novel is organised in three parts, each from the perspectives of three people related to her and affected by this decision:  The first section is a narration by her husband Mr Cheong, with the Dream interlaced.  It culminates in Yeong-hye slashing her wrists when her bullying and violent father tries to force-feed her meat, leading to her being hospitalised. The second part (set two years later) focuses on her older sister In-hye's artist husband and his obsessive artistic project involving Yeong-hye, and its disastrous consequences.  The third part (set about a year later) focuses on In-hye and her relationship with her younger sister, now in a remote psychiatric hospital, and her own memories of her childhood, life and her young child.   This is an engrossing but deeply disquieting short novel that questions human nature and the mind. 

London Rules (Mick Herron)

The fifth novel in the Slow Horses series.   About Roddy Ho blissfully unaware of being scammed by  "his hot girl-friend" Kim, who is being played by North Korean sleeper agents.  Those young baddies had committed a massacre at Abbotsfield, then killed Penguins at the Watering Hole, left a (dud) bomb on a train, etc. Shirley Dander is managing her anger, and staying off coke for many many days at a stretch, and missing Marcus.  Louisa is still moping about Min.  Ho is hauled off to the Park, and Slough House placed under a lock-down by the Dogs, improbably only Emma Flyte there to enforce it; but she is outwitted by Lamb, and the Slow Horses escape from being locked down to track down the terrorists.

First Desk Claude Whelan had (for reasons not so clear) an ancient Park playbook op leaked sometime in the past.   Lamb protects his Slow Horses -- especially Ho (who had passed the document to Kim) and JK Coe, who accidentally knocks a paint tin from a height onto a populist pro-Brexit MP, and the others who mess up in different ways.  A Muslim politician whom the PM supports has skeletons to hide.  Di Taverner uses the opportunity to discredit Whelan and position herself in pole position for First Desk, and Lamb (with some help from Molly Doran) somehow is able to make a deal to shield his joes.   London Rules = CYA.   

Joe Country (Mick Herron)

The sixth novel in the Slow Horses series.  It's snowing in London but much more in Wales. 

Min Harper's son Lucas sees a Royal when he shouldn't and decides to cash in on it.  Except River's dad Harkness and his men are tasked (indirectly by the disgraced ex-minister  Peter Judd) with silencing him.  Louisa to the rescue, after a weird meeting with Clare Harper, now Addison.  Standish is buying bottles of wine after Di Taverner had told her (end of London Rules) how Partner really died.  Lamb tells her more details later.   River, JK Coe and Shirley rush off as support.  So does Emma.

Spook Street (Mick Herron)

Real Tigers (Mick Herron)

Dead Lions (Mick Herron)

Bad Actors (Mick Herron)

The eighth novel in the Slow Horses series.

Slough House (Mick Herron)

Upstream (Mary Oliver)

Absolutely lyrical.  Poetry.   Emerson, Poe. Poetry.  Birds, trees, spiders, foxes.   Makes one want to go to Walden Pond.  (Which we did.)

Heart Lamp (Banu Mushtaq, tr. from Kannada to English by Deepa Bhasthi)

A set of very moving short stories, focussing on the lives and seemingly small situations that loom large faced by  the muslim community in Karnataka (and mainly women).  An inch of ivory, delicately carved, captures the dilemmas they face.   (Details:)

The first story is a moving story of love and marriage, and labour in both senses of the word. 

I did not get the point of the story The Red Lungis.

The translation by Deepa Bhasthi is very deft, low-key and unselfconscious, leaving in many Kannada (and Dakkhani) words without an intrusive explication or a cack-handed English version.  This decision adds to the cultural richness of the narratives, and these terms not come across as a pretension to exoticness.  The translation reads very smoothly and there aren't moments where the reader feels let down. (There are a few places where the copy editor could have made some suggestions, but we shouldn't quibble).  

Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays (Mary Oliver)

More delightfully observed, poignant and thought-provoking evocative poetry by Mary Oliver.  Read this book in the Maine AirBnB at Waldoborough.  Would have also read the thicker Devotions if I had had the time.

From Bauhaus to Our House (Tom Wolfe 1981)

Any Calumn by Tavleen after Deleting Sentences Containing First-person Pronouns