The Maanga

The Madras Book Club met yesterday for the re-launch of a well received book in the name of this glorious city.

The original book, written in Tamil, has been re-written in English by its author K.R.A.Narasiah. The meeting, true to Madras style middle class meetings, was more about Rava Upma. And sadly, the rather mediocre Upma quite easily won the contest — those who came to speak were either uninterested or uninteresting.

The author himself is an affable and slightly ageing man, who drops in trivia about the City’s history in the unlikeliest of conversations. He gives the impression of having researched his book very well and probably, the book is a very good read. The book, one is lead to believe, traces the history of Madras from the time Francis Day got a land grant from through the services of his dubash Beri Thimmappa from the local Nayak — “a strip of no man’s sand three miles long, one mile wide at its broadest[1]” — to set up a trading post for the East India Company in 1639. That land, as we know, was fortified soon into the magnificient Fort St. George.

Oft repeated history was repeated,

“It was in Madras that the first rules of governance and justice, and the red tape and record keeping that went with both, were introduced by Langhorne and Master, Yale and `Pirate’ Pitt. It was here that the oldest civic corporation was established outside Europe,” recounts the author, listing the many firsts.

St. Mary’s church was consecrated on October 28, 1680, and the marriage register records as the first entry the wedding of Elihu Yale, after who is named the Yale University in the U.S. “It was in Fort St. George that Robert Clive worked as a Writer in 1744 on a salary of £5 a year.” Clive was bored with his work; and was `on the verge of suicide on occasion’. He found his true vocation “on the battlefields around Fort St. David in Cuddalore.”

While these bits of random trivia is something every quiz loving adolescent in the city will know, Narasaiah has also taken pains to dig into various historical records — including the only written diary available from those times. The author cites a simple murder of a prostitute as the origin of the traders’ progression to being rulers. That he says, was a landmark event in terms of the local chieftains handing over judicial responsibilities to the British. This, much to the chagrin of the author, was the beginning of an empire won by default.

The subject of the book, no doubt, is something that all of us hold very dear. We don’t need to be sold on it — but what the event failed to do was, sell seriousness and purpose. S Muthiah, in his very own style, quips thus on a different occasion,

Perhaps, then, it was just the glamour of a successful author who is a big name in the Indian book world, a handsome face, a bit of stylish dressing and a St. Stephen’s eloquence. Pity the Madras Book Club can’t get that combination all the time. If it did, it might even regularly get such crowds, even a part of which would do its meagre coffers a world of good.

Sashi Tharoor and his ilk may deserve our contempt — however, that hardly absolves the rest for not even trying. The publisher of this book, a longtime blogger, gave the most insipid of speeches. The author rambled a bit and failed to tell us why he wrote this book. The journalist who was asked speak rambled some more.

Selling bad and badly selling hardly offer choice.

[1] — As read out from land records of the time with Muthiah’s inputs.

The party that leads the United Progressive Alliance government is in a state of moral and political confusion. Demoralised by a string of Assembly election defeats, notably in Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, and Karnataka, and besieged by economic and political troubles, the Congress has absolutely no idea where it is going. Perhaps feeling that it has nothing to lose during the murky period leading up to the 15th general election, which must be held no later than April-May 2009, it has resorted to political adventurism. The government it heads has no answer to the spectre of double-digit inflation, which crept up to 11.42 per cent last week. The mishandling of the Amarnath shrine land affair has set off a wave of communal hate and tension in Jammu and Kashmir, and destabilised the Congress-led dispensation during the run-up to crucial Assembly elections in the State. There has been a significant falling-out of allies or those who came together, in May 2004, to enable a UPA government to be formed on the basis of a National Common Minimum Programme.

The issue on which the ruling party has chosen to make a do-or-die stand is not anything connected with the problems of the people — but the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. Curiously, it is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has no known electoral base and holds office by virtue of being a member of the Rajya Sabha, who has been allowed to pull the trigger on the political arrangement that sustains his minority government

Apart from being as inconsistent, I doubt if there is one other newspaper that can be accused of such bad taste. With the news that N Ram is soon to be replaced doing the rounds across Old Madras gossip circles, one also wonders if the golden handshake involves a red Rajya Sabha seat.

…..was fixed.

There is no other explanation.

Reliance Energy wants the deal. The Indian National Congress will like it. The Left does not. The SP has no opinion.

Guess what the outcome will be.

America is a better country than India is. Or ever will be. The reason, unlike what Atanu Dey wants you to to believe, is not its Constitution; rather, its judges.

It’s true that many Web sites, including Mr. Dylan’s official one, reproduce the lyric as Chief Justice Roberts does. But a more careful Dylanist might have consulted his iPod. “It was almost certainly the clerks who provided the citation,” Professor Long said. “I suppose their use of the Internet to check the lyrics violates one of the first rules they learned when they were all on law review: when quoting, always check the quote with the original source, not someone else’s characterization of what the source said.”

By definition, growing up is confused with having grown up. And Indian business sentiment is possibly the single greatest example[1]. Sevanti Ninan rightly castigates the media at the wrong place. Somehow, one always expects something worthwhile on a Sunday Magazine. Pointing how stupid the stupids are is best left to The Maanga. One thinks.

In an NDTV discussion late last week, predictably, the spokespersons of the CPI(M) and the Indian National Congress were restating their stated positions forcefully. Nilotpal Basu, cleverly started his statement by declaring that the day they were discussing was in fact the thirty third anniversary of the declaration of emergency by Mrs Indira Gandhi. And reminded everyone how the nation should remember what the price of overriding Democracy is. Jayanthi Natrajan, cleverer still, completely side-stepped that allusion and restated her party’s stated position in present tense. After fifteen minutes, Shekar Gupta, the journalist on the panel, in his closing remark, reminded Mr Basu that his party was the only one that vociferously supported Mrs Gandhi’s promulgation of Emergency at that time. NDTV moved on to another program.

In a CNN-IBN program called Devil’s Advocate, where the host is given a license to be probing and the permit is taken quite seriously, Finance Minister P Chidambaram was interviewed. During the interview, when the Finance Minister was answering a specific question, the host tried to ask another question assuming the answer that was just being given out. The interviewee told the interviewer, “listen to me” and went on to explain monetary policy and variables.

Barkha Dutt, in yet another discussion, had Mehbooba Mufti and Omar Abdullah from Kashmir say something about how Kashmir’s people will decide their own levels of tolerance. To a Rajeev Pratap Rudy and a host in Delhi who thought Democracy does not work as rule by majority in one context or the other. Respectively.

[1] — See what I did there?

Fun is passe. Boring is in.

The second tier profile.

A version of history that looks at the now vilified people as proponents of dystopia.

In the next elections, one can be reasonably sure that the DMK will not do well. And in the near future, it will possibly split. The AIADMK lead front is a good bet for the short term — the question is, how does a small regional party like the MDMK  optimize its tactics with respect to a viable medium to long term strategy?

While that holds for most political parties in India — planning for changes in political lanscape, that is — what the MDMK and PMK do in Tamil Nadu will be interesting for reasons slightly more engaging. My theory is, the plausibility of Democracy as we now understand it is limited and that it will be tested first in societies similar to that of this state.