3rd H Y Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture Introduction (IIC, 15.4.2012)

Welcome to the Third H Y Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture. I thank you all for joining us on this occasion, which had he been here, would have been Sharada Prasad’s 88th birthday. Also on behalf of my mother, who unfortunately cannot be here, since she is confined to bed after two recent fractures. 

Throughout his life, Sharada Prasad, or Shouri as family and old friends called him, engaged with a very wide spectrum of ideas, people and institutions, which enriched his life tremendously, and to which he contributed.  Our conception of the annual Memorial Lecture was to celebrate each of these diverse engagements.  In the first lecture, Mukul Kesavan spoke on the nature of the Indian Republic and the dominant strand of the freedom and nation building enterprise of which Shouri was a part.  The second lecture was by Sanjaya Baru on the media, its business and ethics, again an institution and its issues with which Shouri was constantly involved. This year, we visit another theme in which Shouri had a lifelong involvement – language and literature, particularly his mother-tongue Kannada, its relationship with the world, and translation. Sugata Srinivasaraju will speak to us on “Negotiating Two Worlds: Bilingualism as a Cultural Idea”.

Some time ago, in another part of this Centre, Ram Guha cited Sharada Prasad for his linguidextrousness, and the importance of his contribution to both the Kannada and English literary worlds. Sitting in the audience, this was a pleasant experience, a revelation to me. For, while I knew my father knew a handful of languages, and wrote compellingly in both Kannada and English, I never associated him with a polyglot facility for picking up languages quickly– unlike say his teacher B. S. Kesavan, or his close friends from college, NV Krishna Murthi and MV Krishnaswamy. Or maybe I was unconsciously comparing him with the gold standards of multilingual dexterity set by Mysoreans such as BM Srikantiah through to AK Ramanujam.

It is about 70 years ago that Shouri began writing (in the public, publishable sense of the word), in English and in Kannada. At age 18-19, during the Quit India Movement, he maintained a diary in prison, a volume of which my mother discovered a couple of years ago, and which Sugata edited and published two years ago as “A Window on the Wall”. Rosy D’Souza, who is also with us here, translated it from English into Kannada. Around the same time in the early 40s, Shouri also translated into Kannada R. K. Narayan’s first novel “Swami and Friends”. Indeed, for many Mysoreans of that generation, Shouri’s translation was their first encounter with the charming town of Malgudi and its residents.

Most of Shouri’s later translations were in the other direction -- from Kannada to English – chiefly the novels and autobiography of his friend and true renaissance man Shivaram Karanth: Hucchu Manasina Hatthu Mukhagalu (translated as Ten Faces of a Crazy Mind), Maimanagala suhiyalli (translated as Woman of Basrur) and Kudiyara Kusu (translated as The Headman of the Little Hill). And several short stories and essays of writers like Masti Venkatesh Iyengar and others.

It is now my pleasure to introduce this evening’s speaker, Sugata Srinivasa Raju. Sugata is a journalist, writer and translator. Many of you may have seen his articles in Outlook Magazine. Prior to this he worked with The Hindustan Times, Deccan Herald and contributed to the Irish Times in Dublin.  He was also the founding faculty member of the INDIAN INSTITUTE OF JOURNALISM & NEW MEDIA in Bangalore. At 26, he was the youngest editor of ANIKETANA, a quarterly journal of Kannada language and literature in English, published by the Academy of Letters in Karnataka.

In 2000, he was awarded the British Chevening Scholarship for print journalism at the University of Westminster and between 2008 and 2010, he was an ILI Fellow of the Aspen Institute in Colorado.

Beyond sharing a journalistic gene, Sugata combined Shouri’s love for both his mother tongue with a facility with the other tongue (or what one of my parents’ professors called the Step-mother tongue).

Sugata's books include EKUSHEY FEBRUARY, a volume in Kannada published in 2004. PHOENIX AND FOUR OTHER MIME PLAYS, published in 2005, was a translation of his father's plays from the Emergency years, which won him the Karnataka Sahitya Academy translation prize. In 2008, he published KEEPING FAITH WITH THE MOTHER TONGUE - THE ANXIETIES OF A LOCAL CULTURE. Most recently, in February 2012, his book PICKLES FROM HOME- THE WORLDS OF A BILINGUAL was released. Sugata is currently working on a biography of Shivaram Karanth. I am still awaiting the release of a long overdue book on my parents’ dear friend and my “guru”, the film-maker M V Krishnaswamy or MV Kittu.

It was through MV Kittu that Sugata was introduced to my parents. And very soon became someone that Shouri in his last years used to refer to as my “new young friend”. Even in the last few months of his life, when he was frequently disoriented, Shouri’s eyes would light up on hearing that Sugata was on the phone. And I can never forget that look of pure innocent joy on his face when a packet from Sugata arrived with Ballavaru Bahalilla, the second volume of the Kannada translation of Shouri’s “The Book I Won’t be Writing”.

So let us all welcome Sugata Srinivasa Raju.

2nd H Y Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture Introduction (IIC, 17.4.2011)

Good evening and welcome to the second HY Sharada Prasad Memorial Lecture -- Dr Sanjaya Baru will be speaking about “Media, Business and Government”. I’d like to thank all of you for coming here and sharing this moment with us – On the 15th of April, Sharada Prasad would have been 87.

Sharada Prasad, “Shouri” or “Sharada” to most of you, was a man of many facets: Freedom fighter and nationalist, journalist, editor, writer and translator, teacher, music lover, and man interested in design, in culture, inthe arts. Many recall him as an unusual man of letters. Some of us may prefer to call him a man of words, a man of few words, but words well chosen – usually understated, but often sharp, witty, playful. Gentle, he wasn’t a man full of high sentence.

While we all have our personal memories of him, the best way, we felt, to remember Shouri was to have a series of lectures, which engage with the ideas, concepts,values and institutions that were dear to him. Mukul Kesavan spoke at the first memorial lecture on India and Republican Virtue. Today we have Sanjaya Baru speaking about an institution that Shouri engaged with throughout his adult life: the media.

Sanjaya Baru needs no introduction to you all. Most of you are well aware of his expertise in both economics and the media, and his distinguished career with Times of India, Economic Times, Financial Express and now, as the editor of Business Standard. Sanjaya is heir to Shouri in many ways, not just by stepping into his shoes as Media Adviser to the Prime Minister, but also as someone who would uphold the ethics of the profession, someone who understood the calling of an editor. And when Shouri, after over 40 years of writing the report on India for the Encyclopedia Britannica Yearbook, decided that it was time to hand over that duty to someone younger who could analyse nations events, political, economic, social, it was without hesitation that he proposed Sanjaya’s name. 

The subject of Sanjaya’s talk is not merely topical, given recent events, but also one with which Shouri grappled even in the 40s and 50s, and later. Some years ago, when I asked him what he thought of the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model, he let out a gently dismissive cluck – that they stated the obvious, oversimplified, universalised, and above all didn’t provide a viable alternative. Sanjaya, I’m sure, will provide us a thoughtful perspective on how media, business and politics are mutually intertwined. Let us welcome Sanjaya Baru.

The Important Quality of Imran Qureshi

(At the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Qureshi's Rooftop Garden Commission)

Given my predilections in art, I should have been greatly enamoured of Indian miniature paintings (whether Mughal or Rajput). After all they exhibited very modern techniques, foreshortening, flattening, bold usage of colour, abstract shapes and stylised idioms that combined tradition and modernity in radical ways. And yet I avoided them with a vehemence that surprises even me. Maybe it had to do with the smallness of scale — no large murals like a Chagall or Matisse that could overwhelm you at first sight. On reflection I think it had much more to do with the themes that these paintings were about — love scenes from the Krishna leela (which perhaps were a bit embarrassing at a particular age); religious scenes (which conflicted with the atheist posture that I had adopted); or maudlin renditions of ragas (abstract though the concept was, the personification seemed plain silly); or scenes from royal lives (which didn’t square with my republican instincts), particularly the hunting scenes (which also involved cruelty to animals). Having excluded most of these due to my youthful prejudices, all I was effectively left with were stylistic vines, vases, falcons and some nature scenes. And absent from these was a vibrant sense of life, of modern, contemporary life in particular.

Most modern Indian painters, and perhaps those from the subcontinent, have tried to use conceptual ideas, vocabularies and techniques from modern western art, while incorporating Indian themes. Just one such example is Hebbar’s line drawings of classical dancers and musicians. There have also been many novel and dramatic works that address modern Indian life. A friend of my parents, the painter Sarangan, used to use South Indian kitchen implements to press paints into stylistic depictions of Vaishnav symbols — or nudes with equal facility.

But few if any of these artists have used a traditional form and techniques from the past centuries such as those used in Mughal miniature paintings to depict quotidian, secular life. Which is what makes Imran Qureshi so significant as an artist. He presents an entirely fresh answer to the question of what constitutes a modern Miniature painting (at least in the subcontinental context). His small paintings embrace the format of the miniature — a single central figure around which there is a constellation of abstract decorative elements, foliage mainly, yielding a composition that is understood to be a significant episode in a narrative. Qureshi’s genius is to use masterly technique, a completely modern yet anachronistic central figure, and a completely secular unsentimental narrative. The Moderate Enlightenment series, particularly that of a bearded youth with bare upper body exercising with a pair of dumbbells or another pulling off his vest, is a sensuous, rich and path-breaking series of paintings. It immediately connects 21st century Pakistan, modern yet Islamicised, to an Indo-Persian traditional art form, linking the banality of everyday lower middle-class life to a 7th century ethos. And yet being figuratively secular and avoiding dramatic or religious themes.       

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I am glad I was able to see paintings from this series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The special exhibit was, of course, his Metropolitan Museum of Art rooftop garden commission which involved red paint spattered across the roof, as if some carnage had occurred there. But a closer look showed delicate brushwork, where the spattered paint had been feathered into leaves and petals. The overall effect, however, was underwhelming for two reasons: Upper-class New York around Central Park is too bloodless and effete and too removed from daily conflicts for the work to resonate as a socio-political statement. And to a subcontinental, the floor looked like just so much paan thook in a carefully chosen pantone shade. Blood or betel spit, “spatter either way” remarked a brilliant friend of mine.     

But the Moderate Enlightenment series of miniatures a floor below revealed a playfulness, humour and above all, terrific technique involving wasli paper, gold leaf, gouache and watercolours, acrylic paints, bleached negative images of scissors, collages with zippers and fabric (military fatigues in Artillery Pantaloons). It’s that humour, small and witty asides which seem altogether appropriate in a miniature, that make Qureshi so interesting. Rather than his larger site-specific installations that tend to be more single-minded and obvious in their message, such as the rooftop commission or And They Still Seek the Traces of Blood (though they show how he is able to apply the same precision of technique used for miniatures in large works of art too).

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Fifty years ago, recalled on the centenary of a broken April, the cruelest month.

 (April 13, 2019)

The Gandhi Jayanti year brought us into contact with many who had been associated with the freedom movement. Two of our house guests who had known Gandhiji himself were my mother’s uncle KS Acharlu, and Gandhi’s biographer DG Tendulkar. We learnt a lot about the freedom movement from them and from my parents, both of whom had participated in the Quit India movement of 1942 and been arrested. Another reason for us to have been doused in this knowledge was my father’s involvement in the organisation and design of the Gandhi Darshan exhibition, and another exhibition about the freedom movements from the mid eighteenth century onwards. 

The month of April 1969 marked fifty years since the horrific massacre at Jallianwallah Bagh in Amritsar. I had just started school. At age six, I was no longer very young, and had become what my younger son would many years later call a “poemist”. Immature poet that I was, it seemed natural for me to take a rhyme written by the immortal Anonymous, and give it a topical twist:

"Fire! Fire!" said General Dyer;

"Where? Where?" said Colonel Dare;

“In the town," said Major Brown;

“Do some damage?" said Captain Savage;

“Kill them all," said Sergeant Hall.

My mother chuckled, and relayed it to my father, who repeated it to his colleagues at work. Before the end of the day, the verse was bouncing around the corridors of power in the South Block. (Somewhat like the Scarlet Pimpernel doggerel.)

----

The Original

"Fire! Fire!" said Mrs. Dyer;

"Where? Where?" said Mrs. Dare;

"Up the town," said Mrs. Brown;

"Any damage?" said Mrs. Gamage;

"None at all," said Mrs. Hall.

A Bridge Too Far

(Published on Facebook Notes, 14 April 2020) 

  ON USING AAROGYA SETU AS AN E-PASS

The Aarogya Setu App is “aimed at augmenting the initiatives of the Government of India, particularly the Department of Health, in proactively reaching out to and informing the users of the app regarding risks, best practices and relevant advisories pertaining to the containment of COVID-19.”

The Aarogya Setu app is intended to run on Android and iPhones. Currently the model is a voluntary one, where users download and install the app. The effectiveness of the app depends on its widespread adoption. The current environment of fear of contracting the dreaded COVID-19 and the urging by various agencies will surely encourage many users to install the app. And government action may persuade others in other ways.

There is talk that the app will be made quasi-mandatory, in that it will be used as an internal e-pass without which a citizen or resident cannot travel within the country. Consider the scenarios of a migrant labourer try to travel back to his home village, or a worker being allowed into a factory or a construction site. I argue here that using this app as an e-pass may not be a very good idea for multiple reasons.

BEYOND PRIVACY CONCERNS

There are the obvious questions regarding privacy and confidentiality. I am not even going to discuss these. To counter these concerns, quite some effort seems to have been made in the design, development and refinement of the app (on the advice of experts) regarding purpose limitations of storage and use of the data collected by the app. (See the article in Live Mint by Ravi Matthan). Let us accept these at face value. While no formal verification has been carried out and there are no guarantees being given, let us at the outset grant that the app has been designed in good faith and let us for the moment assume that there are no coding errors and bugs and vulnerabilities in the implementation (unfortunately this is almost impossible to ensure, especially in the absence of formal specifications and trustworthy computation bases). Let us also readily grant the overarching interest of the nation (state, society at large) in the unusual circumstances created by the contagiousness of COVID-19 to have access to the information regarding the peregrination history of each citizen, since the safety of life of the citizens trumps any privacy concerns. (Note: I do not believe that privacy should necessarily be sacrificed).

Let us instead examine reasons why the app may NOT be a reliable tool for monitoring, tracking and tracing the spread of the infection, and why there may be problems with making it quasi-mandatory, especially with any plan to use it as an internal certification mechanism. The takeaway: the app and the ecosystem envisaged for its use do not even need to be hacked for it to be rendered significantly less effective than it is touted to be.

COVERAGE AND EXCLUSION

The first issues are coverage and exclusion. In 2020 only an estimated 32% of phones in the country are smart phones. Most users continue to use feature phones. So in fact the most vulnerable sections of the populace such as migrant workers are not likely to be adequately covered by this app. Further, multiple individuals often share a mobile phone. If they belong to the same family and use a smartphone, the app is still a viable solution since it would be prudent to track, test and isolate each member of a family sharing the phone. However, this is less feasible with migrant labour living in slums and labour camps. That requires a much more effective public mechanism for countering the spread of COVID-19 than we currently have in place.

The geographic spread of smartphones is quite unequal — with significant rural-urban and inter-state differences.

Thus areas where there may be a local spread may not even be tracked using the app. Jharkhand is still largely on 2G, so the use of smartphones is much more limited there and in similar regions. As an alternative: if the envisaged use of the app is to track backwards in time the trajectories of users coming to a hotspot, then it might be easier to map the cellphones that come into the coverage of the nearest cell tower (an accuracy of c. 200-250m is possible). Even this is a humongous amount of data.

Another consideration is that the current lockdown has made it hard to obtain parts and services for cellphones. So if a handset malfunctions or a battery needs replacement, instruments are likely to be non-functional for longer periods, disempowering and hobbling the owners in many more ways.

BLUETOOTH MAY LACK BITE 

The technology chosen imposes limitations on the app. The lack of precision in using communication-cell-based tracking is perhaps what led to the choice of using location tracking and Bluetooth technology in the Aarogya Setu app.

Location tracking allows tracking at a gross level, and finer tracking, especially indoor, uses Bluetooth. The app requires two devices to come into Bluetooth range to exchange information. (We will not discuss here what information should be exchanged, whether it should be encrypted, etc.) This idea is effective only if both devices are running the app and have location tracking and Bluetooth communication switched on. Now Bluetooth (even low energy versions) is energy hungry, which is why most most smartphone users do not always turn it on. In usage settings where phone users may not find it easy to keep their phones charged (again consider the large number of working individuals whose professions require them to be in transit or far away from home or office), this is not a very viable prospect.

The app will prove to be useful only when there is an overwhelming buy-in from every person to using it. This is not as easy to achieve as may be thought by panjandrums. If the costs and disincentives that come with having one's trajectory tracked outweigh any benefits of using the app, then the phone user may adopt the expedient of turning off the app (or even the phone), thus circumventing tracking.

Since humans are fallible and forgetful, they may not carry their device with them or may have a valid reason not to do so (e.g., the phone is charging) when they go out on a short excursion from their residence/workplace. Therefore, many interactions which carry risk of contagion may indeed be missed if we were to rely on the app. While policy makers may be tempted to think it possible to mandate the use of this app, it will be very hard to enforce such a fiat. What action will the authorities contemplate if a user turns off (accidentally or deliberately) bluetooth connectivity on their device? These actions are likely to be unduly punitive and arbitrary.

Bluetooth is also not a fool-proof technology — the pairing of devices explicitly still encounters failures fairly often, and automatic pairing is fraught with the likelihood of failed communication. Note that it would be very risky to entertain unauthenticated communication between devices. From our past experiments using Bluetooth and Wifi for automatic pairing of devices in mHealth apps over the years, we (at IITD, as well as our collaborators abroad) encountered failures of secure pairing, as well as communication and authentication failures much more often than desired, thus making the design of robust Bluetooth based protocols difficult. Again, all this means that possible contagions may not be correctly recorded by the app.

Indeed, various users of the app have already noted that it is quite buggy, and have commented on its limitations in their reviews, particularly with respect to the use of Bluetooth, as well as its energy inefficiency. They have noted its lack of features and the very sketchy nature of the information it provides its users. Some have mentioned that the risk assessment done by the app fails to flag high risk even when someone indicates all typical COVID-19 symptoms. Registration and logging in are recurrent problems. The developers have been responding gamely and promise assistance and technical support, but this is not a scalable arrangement that inspires much confidence for a nationwide roll-out.

LACK OF A MODEL OF THE DISEASE

Even if all these technological limitations can be addressed to build a reliable and robust system, there is a more fundamental problem with conception of the app. What constitutes an interaction that merits tracing and tracking? How long do two individuals have to be in proximity of each other? What distance apart should they be, what is the strength and degree of interaction? Are there mitigating circumstances (wearing PPEs, separation by a wall or window) to discount an interaction? In the absence of a precise enough over-approximation of the model of COVID-19 spread, the app may generate far too many false interactions, the parties of each of which may have to be traced down and tested. The problem of false positives may overwhelm the testing and tracing abilities of the healthcare system without commensurate benefits. Unfortunately, the disease and the mechanisms of its spread are not well understood to come up with a useful, precise-enough model which can be reasonably implemented.

BUG-FINDING IS NOT EASY

There also are the standard formalist objections to the deployment of such an app for such a critical purpose. Since there is no model of what is a significant interaction, it is not clear what is being recorded and how it is being used. There are no formal specifications, and worse, the source code is not yet available for inspection and verification. Reliability is critical, and the app does not even begin to address these issues. It is therefore not mature enough to be deployed for critical uses that far exceed its intended purpose. Doing so may have unfortunate consequences for various vulnerable users and also run the risk of overwhelming the capabilities of the public health tracking system with false positives. To do so in our environment of social distrust is fraught with very real dangers.

Political Reporting

(Introduction to a Panel Discussion held in memory of H. Y. Sharada Prasad at the Foreign Correspondents Club, New Delhi, 5 September 2019)

Dear Friends:

I thank you all for coming today for this panel discussion, marking 11 years since H Y Sharada Prasad passed away. I am grateful to the Foreign Correspondents Club for hosting this event — and especially to VK Cherian and Venkat Narayan, who took this initiative, and the other panelists: John Dayal, Ajoy Bose, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, P. Narendra-ji...

Before I proceed, I would like to remember a brave rationalist crusader and journalist, and someone known to our family, who was assassinated by thugs exactly two years ago — Gauri Lankesh. These are the perils of political reporting today.

I am a computer scientist, a professor, not a journalist. But my profession also has to contend with a challenge similar to what journalism has to — rubbish information, fake news, sometimes malicious and venomous, but mostly garbage.

Let me explain: if anyone of you are to look up “H Y Sharada Prasad” on Wikipedia today (increasingly what a young reporter might do) you will find an article which has some correct information in it, but a large amount of incorrect or irrelevant stuff. A photograph has been redacted, allegedly for copyright reasons (those reasons are bogus, incidentally). The first paragraph, with the dates of his birth and death, is reasonably correct. And then comes a complete stunner from left field: “As a Civil servant Sharada Prasad conducted a very famous Income Tax raid which was shown in the movie Raid (2018).” The next part of the article is only slightly less bizarre: it dwells at length on his name and his caste — the latter being completely unimportant to him. It is not accurate about his father’s position (he was a musician, composer and Sanskrit scholar) and neglects his mother’s achievements. The next paragraph is even more bizarre — it reads “At a very young age, Sharada Prasad was married to Kamalamma, a lady of his own Mulukanadu Brahmin community, and from a family of similar background, in a match arranged by their parents in the usual Indian manner.” Complete balderdash: my parents married late in their lives, and theirs was anything but an arranged marriage; Kamalamma was an Iyengar from a very different background. The article even gets wrong the year of Sharada Prasad being awarded the Padma Bhushan. And on Wikipedia, what you see today, you may not find tomorrow.

Now if this is “information” being put up by some well-meaning soul who actually seems to admire the subject of the article, imagine what we will get from politically motivated or malicious sources. One simply cannot trust what is available on the world wide web tap, when major details in the life stories of the topmost public figures are fabricated. And I shudder to think of information gleaned from WhatsApp university or anti-social media such as Twitter or the deeply compromised Quora.

So who was Sharada Prasad? There is a short biography that has been circulated — which is largely accurate, though if he were around, he would have run his editorial pencil over some parts of it. I will instead attempt to provide a very personal account of Sharada Prasad’s life — through my eyes and ears — tying it in with some of the major political events where he was present. You will not find this on Wikipedia or by Googling for it.

***

Sharada Prasad was a Gandhian first and then a Nehruvian. (Not only in temporal order, but also ideologically. This is perhaps important to understand him and the life he lived.) He was inspired by his maternal grandfather, a member of the Servants of India Society and a protege of Gokhale. As a young man, he met Gandhi-ji, who asked him what he wanted to become. In response to his answer, “A journalist”, the Mahatma remarked, "Oh, out to change the world, eh?"

In 1942-43, Sharada Prasad, secretary of the Mysore Maharaja’s College students union, was jailed during the Quit India movement. The diary he maintained shows his ability to comment concisely on the events and personalities of those times.

Around this time, he translated RK Narayan’s “Swami and Friends” into Kannada “Swami mattu avana snehitaru”. You can download a copy of this 1945 book from the BJP online library. (Yes, BJP’s library. I wonder why they have it there. Perhaps they think it’s about a different Swamy.)

After joining the Indian Express (Madras) in 1945, Sharada Prasad moved the following year to its Bombay sister (then called The National Standard). He was on duty as the chief sub-editor when on January 30, 1948 the news of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination came in. In all the frenetic activity, a frail old man came in and handed a sheet of paper to my father, saying it was his tribute. Sharada Prasad brusquely told him that everyone was issuing their own tribute to Bapuji. To which the man said very gently: “I am his son.”

Sharada Prasad was the first Indian to be a Nieman Fellow at Harvard (class of 1956). His year there during the Cold War, gave him a unique perspective on American foreign and domestic policy. Once, at a talk by Thomas E Dewey, he was sitting in the front row. Seeing an Indian, Dewey launched into a criticism of Nehru and India’s non-aligned foreign policy. (Dewey, as some of us might recall, was the subject of one of political journalism’s most egregious errors).  (* "Dewey Defeats Truman" was the erroneous banner headline on the front page of the first editions of the Chicago Daily Tribune on November 3, 1948).

In most ways, I would say that his journalistic values were more influenced by American practices and conventions than British. Some of his Harvard classmates went on to very distinguished careers, such as Richard Harwood, Ombudsman of the Washington Post.

During Sharada Prasad’s stint as editor, Yojana, the journal of the Planning Commission, often carried articles on developmental issues that were critical of the official policy of the government, giving it credibility as a serious journal. Other governmental editors would ask him how he could get away with it. “By not asking for clearance. The trouble with advice is that if you ask for it, it will be given. The trouble with permission is that if you ask for it, it will be denied”, he would say.

I was too young to recall how he dealt with the tumultuous year of 1969, with bank nationalisation and the Congress split, but I have a slightly better recollection of 1971, when he worked tirelessly briefing the press on every development from the genocide in East Pakistan, the rallying of world opinion to India’s viewpoint, and the final liberation of Bangladesh in December. Various articles by him provide succinct accounts of those events and what transpired at the highest levels. In 1972, he was present at the signing of the Simla* Accord and the last-minute agreements that made it possible, when even seasoned diplomats such as TN Kaul had given up and left.  (* now Shimla)

The journalist Inder Malhotra, who wrote two biographies of Indira Gandhi, recalled some years ago with some nostalgia the nature of the press briefings by Sharada Prasad — and the professional integrity and personal decency he brought to his job, even when in adversarial roles: “He would cogently state the views of his boss, answer the questions with good humour, and not put any spin on events and policies.”

Not that the Press always took his word as gospel — I recall how he spent the best part of his 17th wedding anniversary trying to explain the workings of India’s “peaceful nuclear test”… only to have the papers write about “India’s Bomb”.

I was not around in Delhi in that particular day in June 1975, so I did not see firsthand the turmoil he went through in experiencing what he described as the “chill that hung in the room at 1, Akbar Road when the cabinet gave its approval to the proclamation”. The Emergency was a difficult period for him, trying to remain true to his Gandhian ethics while working in an autocratic governmental framework. One can see this in two of the most important books on the Emergency: PN Dhar’s “Indira Gandhi, the Emergency and Indian Democracy”, and BN Tandon’s “PMO Diaries”. (My brother Ravi has written about some of the covert negotiations between JP, represented by our maternal uncle KS Radhakrishna, and Indira Gandhi taking place in our house).

Sharada Prasad’s short tenure with Morarjibhai Desai was far less demanding — his new boss believed he could handle everything by himself, and always answered each question with a counter-question. He was however a straightforward and fair person. Sharada Prasad found his metier as a teacher (today is Teacher’s Day) and institution builder in the period 1978-80, when he was Director of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC). This was also when he was able to find time to write a few books. It was then that I got to spend much more time with him at home, and while he and TS Satyan toured Karnataka for a coffee-table volume.

The 1980-84 years were difficult ones because India had changed, and lost its innocence to terrorism. He was back in the PMO, but without the close set of brilliant colleagues with whom he had formed such a close personal and professional bond in the 1966-’77 period. There were still some old-time associates — Dr KP Mathur and above all G Parthasarathi, AK Damodaran, KR Narayanan and journalists such as VK Madhavan Kutty.

That world was to change forever on 31st October 1984. Sharada Prasad was waiting with Peter Ustinov in the garden of 1 Akbar Road, when they heard the rat-a-tat-tat of an automatic weapon emptying its charge. From Operation Blue Star to the Delhi carnage, these were horrendous days for someone who was quintessentially Gandhian in thought and had seen some of the violence of India’s painful birth.

I won’t dwell further on Sharada Prasad’s journey in government, but will close with a few observations on how he saw the media change in his twilight years. He once very comically illustrated what he thought was wrong with TV News — “The anchor says something, then the camera goes to a reporter in the field, who says “Absolutely”, and then repeats what the anchor has just said. Then back in the studio, the anchor summarises what reporter has parroted, and turns to the channel’s own “political editor”, who then expounds on just that very same viewpoint. At no stage do they engage with anyone or anything other than their own opinions.”

I do not know how he would have reacted to the newly independent India of his young working life morphing itself into today’s shallow and celebrittle Times of India, or our brave young Republic to a raucous Republic TV. (Maybe it should be pronounced Republiktva).

Till the late 70s, Sharada Prasad was still of the opinion that his profession continued to respect people of integrity such as CN Chittaranjan (CNC of Mainstream) and, in government service, Mahendrabhai Desai. He had regard for the basic decency of people who were seen to be on the other side of a political fence, such as Kuldip Nayar. In his twilight years, however, he grew quite despondent about the crass commercialism to which journalists had descended. The ad revenues and business interests were now openly acknowledged as the drivers of the profession. The newspaper barons whom he had battled in the 50s as a working journalist had ultimately won, and the Chomsky-Herman Propaganda Model was in full swing.

***

During the tenure of HY Sharada Prasad as Information Advisor to prime ministers Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, and Rajiv Gandhi, from 1966 to 1989, there was no social media and no internet. There was only one television channel — the government owned Doordarshan, and one radio network — the government owned All India Radio (Akashvani). However, there were thousands of newspapers and journals, in all Indian languages and English, as well as numerous foreign correspondents.

The panel will discuss how coverage of Indian politics has changed from the days of HY Sharada Prasad, the relationships between politicians and the media, the role of big business in media over the decades, how attempts are made to influence coverage or censor reportage, and the rise of fake news and disinformation. Thank you once again.

Frisell's Trio at the Blue Note, and a walk in the Village: 22.1.2012

Not an afro dizzy act
The music was mellow
The brushes, thrumming, and the bass
An upright plucky fellow.

Ron was the trio's anchor,
He played in many styles.
The fluid walking bass line --
Quintetessentially from Miles.

Bill played many subtle strains
Finding the right note.
Complex airs, soft refrains,
An aural anecdote.

Joey laid down a gentle groove
With his sticks and with his hand;
The mallets on the cymbals
The sound of this jazz band.

The gatemen attempted witty
Better early they said than late.
Though sitting there wasn't pretty
The night was worth the wait.

In this naked city,
A change is gonna come.
A tapped-on fret, a pull off then
Fingers on the drum.

Two Pomerazz martinis
To get into the mood
A platter of fruit and cheese
Was more than enough food.

The melody, chords and rhythm,
Turned towards the blues,
The players virtuoso
And Euterpe the muse.

Was the manchego kiwixotic?
Grape, apple, strawberry,
The baguette somewhat sweetish,
I hit a bleu note with the brie.

The other drink was mouthwash
Should have had it afterwards
When walking round the Village
And playing with no words.

The couple walked around the Square
With a Bleecker view of life;
They walked trying not to be
A Husband and a Wife.

A window held vibrations
With the good Lord's prayer.
A dobro in Umanov's,
Gaiety in the cold night air.

These boots are made for walking
Though they're not of UGGly hide.
These lines were meant for crossing
But thank you for the ride.