Why has Penguin inflicted anew on Indian readers this desultory book on Mahatma Gandhi, quite the worst by a long chalk among the lot I have read?  That may sound heretical in view of the many laudatory reviews excerpted on the flyleaf of this edition (obviously not corrected or updated). "It has not aged well" might be a charitable explanation, but I would have rated it the same had I read it when it first came out 37 years ago.The contents of the book appeared initially in The New Yorker. They are grouped into three sections: subtler and more lasting shapes, in the steps of the autobiographer and his biographers, and, finally, the company they keep.The second section, the longest (nearly half the book), is also the easiest to deal with. It is a straightforward narration (and only that) of the great man's life, based on secondary sources. The reader should not expect anything new here. And there isn't. Ved Mehta anticipates this in the foreword. "The life of ... Gandhi ... is abundant

The Mahatma on the periphery

Business Standard

On June 1, 2001, around 20 members of the royal family of Nepal gathered at the Narayanhiti Palace in Kathmandu for their customary soiree. After drinks had been served in the billiard room, the host, 29-year-old Crown Prince Dipendra, appeared from his bedroom in battledress uniform and went on a shooting spree, killing 11 people, including his parents, King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev and Queen Aishwarya. Next, Dipendra shot himself in the head; he died three days later.To outside observers, the royal rampage was the stuff of Greek tragedy. Dipendra, who was believed to have a fondness for women and firearms, was unwavering in his desire to marry Devyani Rana. His parents were equally determined in their objection to his girlfriend, a descendent of the Ranas who had once wrested power from the Shah dynasty. A furious, indecisive Dipendra sorted out the matter by wiping out almost his entire clan. According to traditional Nepalese, however, what unfolded that fateful evening had deep

The goddess of all things

Sunanda K Datta-Ray's account of the annexation of Sikkim was originally published in 1984. The book's detailed dismantling of the conventional wisdom about a constitutional "merger" of Sikkim raised several hackles. Not least because it shredded the myths and lies perpetrated by the government's propaganda with the connivance of a supine and apathetic media. A defamation suit was duly filed and the Delhi High Court issued an interim order forbidding sales until the case was settled. Eventually an out-of-court settlement was reached and the ban on sales lifted; but the publisher claimed that no copies of the book were left to be sold and nor would he reprint. Pusillanimity of publishers evidently has a long history in India.The appearance of a revised edition is welcome and long overdue. The book is stamped with all the qualities that make Mr Datta-Ray one of our finest chroniclers of contemporary history: it is thoroughly researched, closely argued, and superbly written. By turning th

Lifting the 'sacred veil' on Sikkim

On the day Hillary Clinton returned to Capitol Hill after losing the 2008 Democratic nomination for president, her staff donned sweatbands and gym shorts and staged a Ping-Pong tournament in her office to cheer her up. Frustrated at the way Barack Obama had left her in the technological dust, she turned herself into a digitally charged secretary of state, championing the use of Twitter for diplomacy and once telling a group of technology executives, "Use me like an app."Though she appeared to glide above domestic politics at the State Department, she always kept one eye on the field, even following a dinner with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace with a phone call to a New York politician who had just won a tough race for Congress. She did not spill the beans to her husband about the planned raid on Osama bin Laden's compound; the former president found out about it from a late-night call from President Obama ("Hillary probably told you," the president said to a clueless Bill Clinton

Madame Secretary

A former cabinet secretary's take on what ails governance in India is neither path-breaking nor particularly insightful

Governance at right angles

"She brings the perspective of a black woman who felt like she belonged anywhere, but could alter the meaning of her blackness at will," says author Kaplan of Reynolds

An American cocktail

On April 16, 1917, a "little man with Asiatic features" stepped off a train at Finlyandsky Station in Petrograd, modern-day St Petersburg. Apart from the crowd of fervid supporters waiting to receive Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov "Lenin" from his long exile, three Englishmen unobtrusively observed the event.To Arthur Ransome, a journalist, Lenin was an unimpressive figure, not even worthy of mention in that evening's despatches.Paul Dukes, a courier with the British embassy, was also underwhelmed, but Lenin's message of world revolution disturbed him enough to warn the foreign office back home. His telegram was treated as a joke.The third observer was William Gibson, merchant and adventurer, who did not make the cardinal mistake of underestimating this unimpressive, "ugly bald man … with eyes like daggers".As history showed, Dukes' and Gibson's instincts about Lenin were right and the implications for contemporary geopolitics were profound. After all, the First World War was under way and

Derring-do in Bolshevik Russia

The extravagant, sometimes kitschy opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics on February 7 gave us a cleaned-up, World's Fair version of Russian history, celebrating the glories of its scientific and artistic achievements while airbrushing the horrors of its Stalinist past. At the same time, the ceremony was devised to try to make the world forget the dark side of President Vladimir V Putin's Russia - its smothering of dissent, its oppressive anti-gay laws - and to promote an image of the country as a modernising great power ascendant on the world stage.From the journalist Gregory Feifer's lively new book, Russians: The People Behind the Power, it is clear that the oversize ceremony was very much in keeping with a long-standing Russian penchant for the big and bold and italicised, and that the much-talked-about problems with the games (monumental cost overruns, unfinished hotel rooms, spring temperatures inhospitable to snowboarding and skiing) simply underscore pervasive troubles with co

A nation perpetually under a thumb

This slim volume contains the distilled wisdom of a reputed historian who has a distinct approach to the study of the past and contemporary societies. Irfan Habib employs the materialistic interpretation of history and social dialectics to draw connections between seemingly unconnected and complex facts.The burden of this book is that the period from 1757 to 1857 marks a clear "transformation of colonialism from a mercantilist system into 'free trade' imperialism". There are two distinct phases of British involvement with India. In the first, "the drive for tribute was of overriding significance". In the second, India also became "a captive market for Britain" and the impact proved economically and socially disastrous.But first, and importantly, the author refutes the claim of colonisers and colonial historians that Indian agriculture was either "stagnant" or "stationary" in 1700. As an essentially agricultural economy, India was producing not only food crops but also cash crops such a

How Britain underdeveloped India

When Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister of Israel in a landslide 13 years ago, many close to David Landau, a left-leaning British-born Israeli journalist, thought seriously of leaving the country. The future under Sharon, it seemed to them, held only war and bloodshed. Yet when Prime Minister Sharon collapsed from a stroke less than five years later, "We wept," Mr Landau writes. "Not just for him; for ourselves."It is Sharon's wholly surprising journey from ruthless military commander to what Mr Landau calls "national father figure", from territory-expanding champion to Palestinian state advocate, that most interests Mr Landau in Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon, his fine, comprehensive and readable biography. Five years in the making and published just after Sharon's death last month, the book closely chronicles Sharon's epic military and political battles, serving as a kind of national history.It also seeks to grapple with "what ifs". If Sharon had not visited the Temple Mount in

The bulldozer of Israel

Throat surgery left her with a masculine voice, but the doyenne of the Kirana gharana turned it into an advantage through years of hard work, says author in a review of a biography of the musician

Gangubai's search for perfection

On Hinduism

Ramayana

Doniger

What is there in Wendy Doniger's book that has raised the hackles of the Hindu right wing

What they don't want us to read

Of the three nation states that succeeded colonial British India, Bangladesh is the youngest, being born amid the tumult, chaos, turmoil and bloodshed of the India-Pakistan war of 1971.While Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and the Indian armed forces had their own unique role to play in the creation of Bangladesh, much of the credit rightfully goes to one man - Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh.But while reams have been written about Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding fathers of India and Pakistan, respectively, the same cannot be said about Mujib. True, there are works in both Bangladesh and in India, but most of them are in Bangla. And most are hagiographies, lacking objectivity, since the long shadow of Mujib dominates Bangladesh to the present day.Syed Badrul Ahsan's latest book, then, is a welcome addition to the canon of literature on Bangladesh's founder.Mr Ahsan, a former teacher of English and a veteran journalist, is currently the executi

A founding father's journey

"My name is Khan and I am not a terrorist." This dialogue, from Shah Rukh Khan's 2010 Bollywood film My Name is Khan, sought to send a strong message to the world that Khan may be a common surname among terrorists but there is little similarity in terms of spirit between ordinary Muslims and their fundamentalist brethren. In fact, the dialogue from the movie is reflective of the new thinking among the Indian Muslim community - or at least among the section that is gaining influence, is proud of its religious identity, and is secular, progressive and nationalistic. Veteran journalist Hasan Suroor has tried to capture this change-in-the-making among Indian Muslim youth in India's Muslim Spring: Why is Nobody Talking About it?The change is gradual and is being driven by the new generation of Muslims, especially women. Young Muslims want to move ahead and make the most of available opportunities. They are not waiting for "hand-outs" from the government. Nor are they willing to be led by op

Muslim middle class' coming of age

Towards the middle of Gold, Mathew Hart quotes an old prospector in John Huston's 1948 gold hunt movie, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, as saying, "I know what gold does to men's souls." To which Mr Hart - a veteran journalist and former editor of a diamond trade magazine, whose earlier books have been on the diamond           mining industry and Canada's gold rush - adds, "Gold and crime go hand in hand."There is plenty of evidence in the book to support the two statements. The avarice that fuels the industry runs like a thread through the book. The Spaniards in their thirst for gold in the 16th century destroyed a civilisation in South America; in South Africa, thieves operate an illegal mining industry that siphons off anything between $1 billion and $2 billion of the country's gold ore a year; in China, thousands of illegal miners are spread throughout the country's gold-bearing regions, running a cottage industry; and in parts of Africa, gold (along with diamonds) finances triba

What gold did to men's souls

Anita Raghavan

Indians often rise to the highest levels in US companies, but never fully embrace American culture, the author of a best-seller on the Galleon scandal tells Kanika Datta

Lunch with BS: Anita Raghavan

The saga of Edward J Snowden, the man whose leaked documents revealed the Orwellian dimensions of the National Security Agency (NSA), reads like a le Carre novel crossed with something by Kafka - at least it does in Luke Harding's new book, The Snowden Files.A 29-year-old NSA contractor, alarmed by the agency's vast surveillance dragnet, starts secretly collecting hundreds of thousands of classified government documents from his employer and turns them over to journalists, revealing the agency's colossal reach and indiscriminate vacuuming up of information about people's phone calls, emails and contacts.The revelations not only pull back a curtain on the secretive agency's expanded workings since 9/11, but also unleash an urgent public debate. A debate about the balance between civil liberties and national security; about the scope and protocols of United States government surveillance; about the relationship between the NSA and giant Internet and phone companies; about Web infrastruct

The needles in the NSA haystack

Or what serial bloopers really taught the author. Authentic, distilled Dilbertian wisdom from the creator of the comic strip

A few of my favourite failures

It is not easy to identify the precise reason that Ved Mehta is such a delightful read. His prose is simple. His skills as a raconteur are impeccable. He is autobiographical in many of his stories, but rarely lets the first-person account bias the reader's perspective either way. In his narratives, therefore, he achieves a rare amalgam of passionate objectivity.These are all qualities that should distinguish any author from the ordinary and place him on a high pedestal among Indo-American writers in English. Yet there is something more that makes his writings endearing and easy to read. The volume under review provides an answer to the question of what actually makes Ved Mehta still sought after and captivating several decades after he penned many of those memoirs of his life in India, his family and his interactions with well-known personalities.It is his empathy with the characters he presents in his writings and the candour with which he captures their follies and foibles that imbue

Ved Mehta's ways of seeing

In 1964, when Mike Smith brought the MCC team to India, Bapu Nadkarni went down in bowling history for delivering 186 balls of which 162 were dot balls. Of these 31 overs, 27 were maidens. The English batsmen were done in by the way the left-arm spinner pegged away at the same spot on a dead wicket.I recount this episode because, in many ways, Savak Sohrab Tarapore is to monetary economics and macroeconomists what Bapu Nadkarni, or Rameshchandra Gangaram Nadkarni to give him his full name, was to bowlers - unfussy, clear, consistent and focused on the target in a measure that is hard to replicate.If Mr Nadkarni was the man to whom the captain threw the ball when he needed to keep down the runs (his economy rate was just 1.67 runs per over in his Test career), it is to Mr Tarapore we must turn to keep inflation down, because inflation is to Mr Tarapore what Ravana was to Ram or what Narendra Modi is to the Congress party - it has to be vanquished at all costs.While he was at the Reserve

Monetary policy's eminence grise

It's not generally known that Margaret Thatcher had two near-brushes with India early in life. Jonathan Aitken, author of this chatty biography, mentions one in passing but probably doesn't realise that if, as a science undergraduate at Oxford, she had married her fellow-student, Lord Craigmyle, she might have been a very burra memsahib indeed. Craigmyle was one of the heirs to Lord Inchcape's commercial empire, but according to the young peer's cousin Lord Tanlaw, better remembered in India as Simon Mackay, guardian of the Inchcape interests, Lady Craigmyle dismissed her son's girlfriend with, "In trade and in science! We know nobody who is in either!"Thatcher's father killed the other prospect by warning that the Indian Civil Service wouldn't take her far since the British were already marking time in India. One suspects she wanted to take the exam not so much for "the glittering prizes of the Raj" as to be the first female to storm a male bastion. Ultimately, of course, she shattere

'That stubborn Salome'

Book News: Check out for latest book news, reviews, book launches and more on Business Standard. Explore now for new books reviews along with books writers and novel reviews and more.

Books News: Latest Book, Book Reviews, Book Features, Book Launches | Business Standard

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