BS blog 11

The other day in the narrow lane behind our office I watched as a vast ivory-white SUV executed a three-point (well, many-point) turn. Any car thus hemmed in would have looked silly — and so, despite its de luxe pedigree, did this Audi Q7. What was such a fancy automobile doing lurching about in this dingy lane? Needless to say, a chauffeur was doing the driving. The owner, no doubt some sort of businessman, must have been paying court at the sales tax office nearby..

In India there’s no escaping the close juxtaposition of stylish and sordid. But surely they don’t have to be forcibly united — by, no less, a German luxury brand?

I’m talking about the ads taken out by the Audi Delhi and Gurgaon dealerships in the Sunday, December 6, HT City and Delhi Times. On page 3 of City, Audi Delhi had a mid-size ad promoting the A6, Audi’s mid-range sedan. And on page 2 of DT, Audi Gurgaon bought a full-page ad to showcase its big new showroom.

A test drive in the new Audi A6.
Your good karma of the day.

That’s what the HT ad said. Do you understand what it means? I don’t. In the crudest way one grasps the sense of it, but then there’s the explanatory text below those lines:

One good turn deserves another. Hence the new generation of the Audi A6 that continues to enjoy an undoubted worldwide leadership in its class. Set foot inside; you’ll know you’re doing the right thing. The new Audi A6. It’s perfection reincarnate.

Now this is poor advertising copy. What good turn did I do? Or am I doing good (”the right thing”) by test-driving the car? Is the car itself the reward for someone’s good turn somewhere? Why mention doubts at all? As for the last two phrases, yes, okay, I get it, it’s an updated model — but now we’re talking reincarnation?

And then the full-page DT ad. After some brash pleasantries (”58,684 square feet of Audi”) it says:

With 14 models on display, you will discover the widest range of options than anywhere else. The models, variants and accessories on display are among the newest and most advanced offerings. Adding another feather in the cap, Audi Gurgaon has opened a luxury car workshop, the largest in the country with world class facilities and state-of-the-art technology. Be our guest and discover the world of Audi with a team as passionate as the experience of the automobile.

How unappetising. That’s not even English. And the photo of the workshop makes it look like a garage with glass walls. Not much style there.

Audi’s marketing strapline is “Vorpsrung durch Technik”, or “Leap ahead through technology”. They may well live by it inside their cars, but how about outside? Bad English and daft copy don’t transmit that same message of quality and class — it’s all very lowbrow. The final faux pas in the DT ad, in my opinion, is the exhortation at the end:

For an Audi Experience
SMS Audi to —–

Shouldn’t that be the Audi experience? And please, save the SMSing for bad TV talent shows. Unless — and this is chilling — the only people who can afford an Audi are the ones who didn’t need to invest in the polish of an all-round education. That’s another sad sign of the times: money and class have very little to do with each other. Whatever the truth, a European luxury brand ought to have a little more self-respect.

OVERLEAF 58

As with all the bad news from Iraq and Af-Pak, sooner or later the bad news on the climate acquires a stultifying sameness. Only when a surge is in sight — troop surge, storm surge — does one’s news radar jolt awake momentarily.

The cause of this deadened state is not too much information, rather, it is not enough of the right sort of information. Despite the barrage of news and opinion, we don’t know enough to figure out what the right questions are. Without that foundation, our knowledge rests on a bog, into which it is liable to settle with a gentle burp or two of greenhouse gas (or, hot air).

As far as geopolitics goes, I can’t think of any solution other than giving your inner sceptic a good workout. To clear your head on climate change, however, I recommend John Houghton’s book, Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (Cambridge University Press, 1997, now in a fourth edition). The book was in turn recommended to me by Mahua Acharya, a friend who has worked for years in the sustainable business field and helped set up the intenational carbon trading mechanism.

Houghton was a professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford, has worked for NASA, and headed the UK’s Meteorological Office as well as the Scientific Assessment Working Group of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which shared the 1997 Nobel peace prize. Here are the questions he poses:

[A]re human activities altering the climate? Is global warming a reality? How big are the changes likely to be? Will there be more serious disasters; will they be more frequent? Can we adapt to climate change or can we change the way we do things so that we can slow down the change or even prevent it occurring?

Later he repeats and amplifies:

In the year 2060 my grandchildren [the book is dedicated to them] will be approaching seventy; what will their world be like? Indeed, what will it be like during the seventy years or so of their normal life span? … Will the increasing scale of human activities affect the environment? In particular, will the world be warmer? How is its climate likely to change? Before studying future climate changes, what can be said about climate changes in the past?

Those are good questions, practical and universal, yet personal. In the contentious environment of climate negotiations — nobody expects serene harmony in Copenhagen next week — every constituency has its own version of the facts. To read Houghton is to sail through these tricky shoals without running aground.

Nor will the average reader feel lost at sea, because Houghton starts from first principles and writes clearly and simply (sample chapter headings: “Is the Climate Changing?”, “How the Earth Keeps Warm”, “How Stable has Past Climate Been?”, “Is the Climate Chaotic?”, “The Impact on Human Health”). There are diagrams and numbers, but nothing you can’t handle. He is judicious but firm: to the best of our knowledge, science is not on the side of the climate-change deniers.

But Houghton is also a practising Christian. Thus, in this scientific book, with some trepidation, he says, he included a chapter titled “Why Should We Be Concerned?”. It tackles “the question of the responsibility of humans for the Earth and for looking after the environment”, applying a resonant metaphor. “How well do we humans match up to the description of ourselves as gardeners caring for the Earth?” Houghton asks. “Not very well, it must be said; we are more often exploiters and spoilers than cultivators. Some blame science and technology for the problems, although the fault must lie with the craftsman rather than with the tools!” God may have given humans rule over creation, but, says the author, to tend it, not drain it dry.

It’s a refreshing approach, short-changing not science, nor politics, nor ethics, and it is the right one.

OVERLEAF 57

The zeitgeist builds itself; being right up close to events, we see at first only the individual bricks. At some particular moment, however, a precipitating event suddenly converts the soup of soluble doubts to a crystal of certainty. Bricks become house.

The precipitating point, for me, was a lecture by the political scientist and academic Sunil Khilnani, delivered in Delhi this week. Khilnani is the author of the well-known The Idea of India (1997), and is currently finishing up a biography of Jawaharlal Nehru, the last truly big thinker in Indian government. His lecture was titled “The Paradox of India’s New Prosperity”, and was closely based on a chapter he has written for the Business Standard India 2010 annual, to be published in January.

Khilnani told his elderly audience (it was at the India International Centre) that India’s post-liberalisation economic success had pushed some sectors fast and far, and in doing so had created an image of India shining, “India as a brand”, that reflected the boosted aspirations of millions of young Indians. He quoted from a survey in late 2008 according to which, he said, “a remarkable four-fifths of these young Indians [under 30] are optimistic about their future, and the future of their children”.

The problem, Khilnani explained, was that expectations had outpaced reality. Steps urgently needed to be taken to manage the consequences of the inevitable disillusionment. He offered a glimpse of a solution: “Disparities between growth in the countryside and the cities, regional unevenness, conflicts over scarce natural resources and over how to deal with the environmental effects of growth — these not only require aggressive efforts at redistribution, but also a new national story.”

Now, none of this is uniquely insightful — and Khilnani stopped short of describing that “new national story” apart from saying that it had more to do with politics than economics — but even so, the penny had dropped. Two processes have been building in parallel: economic success in some quarters and thereby aspirations for all, and, at the same time, a sense of looming universal crisis.

It’s not just the delicate economy, nor the USA’s jerky slide from hegemony. On nearly every front of organised human activity, columnists and editorial writers, as well as ordinary people making everyday conversation, are anticipating blowback from problems long deferred to the future. It all follows along the lines of W B Yeats’s oft-quoted poem, written after the First World War, which admittedly will suit many circumstances:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

There must be some message in this collective throwing-up of hands. Even David Brooks, the wise New York Times columnist, wrote recently that America, to rescue itself, had to rediscover its faith in the future. He said: “It would be nice if some leader could induce the country to salivate for the future again. That would mean connecting discrete policies — education, technological innovation, funding for basic research — into a single long-term narrative.”

“It would be nice” is a blazon of defeat. We know what ought to be done, but also, equally intuitively, that nothing much can be done. Unless there’s a revolution; and those who know their history know that revolutions are rare, and that when they do happen they are messy, unpredictable and failure-prone. Even the idea of revolution is full of paradox: it encompasses a sense of humans as fundamentally flawed and perfectible. On the one hand the rising tide of panic is soul-sapping, and on the other, the realisation that nothing short of a new paradigm will spring us from our trap, curiously, reaffirms our faith.

Restaurateur-entrepreneur A D Singh is a regular on page 3s, but is not well known for all that. I met him for lunch and was pleasantly surprised

Before we’ve even sat down, at his favourite table in the corner, A D Singh has his hands on the book I’m carrying. It’s not his type, so he flips through quickly. I show him my favourite part: a fly, immaculately squashed between two pages. AD laughs, a long, slow stutter of a laugh. “Got caught reading, eh?”

Sure did. And so did AD, with less apocalyptic results. His twin brother and he are avid readers. “As kids, we used to walk around at birthday parties like this…” (He mimics holding a book up to his face.) “It’s fascinating. Your world keeps changing, and half the time we’d rather live in that world than our own reality.” The consequence? “We would read in cars, all the time, so we both got glasses really early.”

We’re sitting at the Olive in Mehrauli. Our table looks onto a leaf-dappled courtyard and it’s a pleasantly warm day. AD orders for us both — a panzanella, which is a summery Italian salad, to be followed by gnocchi, a pasta dish.

“Every night,” he continues, “especially when my wife [designer Sabina Singh] is not there and I get home to an empty house, which is about half the week, I read myself to sleep. Obviously, with LAP [his new members-only lounge in Delhi, in partnership with actor Arjun Rampal] opening, all that’s changed. Yesterday I looked at my watch at one point and it was 4:50. I said, ‘Guys, I’m out of here.’ LAP was still going on — I left.”

Recent favourite books include Alexander McCall Smith’s Mma Ramotswe series and Ashok Banker’s science-fantasyish retellings of the Ramayana. “I was just riveted,” AD says. “I thought it was a great way to take our mythology to a whole new audience.”

He’s a past master at bringing new products to new audiences. He was at the vanguard of the standalone boom in fine dining in India, starting with a coffee-and-desserts cafe and moving up the ladder to his current chain of restaurants in three cities — each one more or less different in menu and ambience.

“When I reached the stage in my life that I didn’t know where I was going,” says AD, now in his late 40s, “I left the corporate sector and joined an NGO. I enjoyed it very much and felt a great sense of ‘this is who I am’, but at that time they were paying me Rs 400-600, and I was turning 28. I was good with men, material, resources, integrity, leadership. But not only was the budget not there, there was the attitude that you have to give up everything. That’s not really what an NGO should be. An NGO should be professionally run, to professional standards, obviously with the highest integrity and deliverables.”

Things did change in the NGO world, but AD had moved on — to become an entrepreneur. “My first thought was, [it has to be] something to do with parties, and then I had a sweet tooth, and third, I lived in this place [Bandra in Mumbai] where I realised there was this market niche — to get these great desserts by the slice. So when I opened Just Desserts it was a first. It was a space of our times, a cool cafe where there were no cafes.”

Not only did AD insist on “a quality of F&B that you did not have outside a five-star”, he understood “positioning and statement”. “That’s why I brought in the concept of live jazz. I wasn’t a big jazz lover — it was a positioning. We hadn’t had live music for 20-30 years. So it worked at many levels.” With constant exposure, jazz grew to be “a big part” of AD’s life.

Likewise food. “I’m not really a gourmet,” AD says. “I didn’t know food but in the old days I started writing a weekly column for Metropolis on Sunday on new food, restaurants. That’s where I really started learning the business. When you’re press, chefs make time for you. I spent hours with some of the best chefs that we have. I still don’t have the tongue of a gourmet, but what I’m very good with is vision. I’m basically a dreamer.”

(Which explains why this avid reader wanders around with short story outlines forming in his head. He tells me one set in Goa. It certainly has potential. “Writing is damn hard work,” he says. “I’ve never really got down to it, and I don’t think I ever will.”)

Here comes the panzanella, tart and sunny. “Bon appetit,” says AD, fork already in motion. His eating is like his speaking, fluent yet deliberate. Five minutes on: “This is a variation [of panzanella] I like”. And later, about the gnocchi, with long pauses for judgement: “The gnocchi is perfect. The sauce might need a touch of salt. It’s good. Very good. Outstanding.”

He’s imperious with the waiters, without being condescending. “Boys. Boys,” he calls, gesturing for a napkin. And he doesn’t like interruption. Yet he responds, as to an equal, to callow questions from a diner at the next table about why there isn’t yet an Olive in Kolkata.

He also likes eating with his hands. This occasions a story: “I was looking for investors for a company. Some fund approached me, investment guys. So I had a meeting. It went on for an hour. I was tired and I had things on my mind, but it went quite well.” The funds came through quickly. Later AD was told why: at the mid-meeting buffet he ate with his hands. The investors’ doubts about this page-three personality — “how serious, how grounded are you” — immediately vanished.

Similarly, AD says, he won the space for his first Olive in Bandra because, unlike the other prospective tenants, AD had dreadlocks. The landlord later told him he thought “‘This guy obviously has a different headspace — he’s not the kind who’ll try to steal my property.’”

“It’s funny how these little things convince them right away,” AD says.

The little things count more now than ever now, as AD hones quality to meet the challenge of an influx of world-class chefs to India starting next year. It’s clear enough from his restaurants and his manner that he’s able to inspire a simultaneously welcoming and exacting spirit. That’s a strength, and a sign of class.

A boy, a family, a village and a region on the cusp of Partition

Train to India: Memories of Another Bengal
Maloy Krishna Dhar
Penguin
pp xiv + 308

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Partition seems to have cheated everyone of something. The stories of loss are many but by now generally familiar. Friendship, homeland, property, family, honour, reason, life itself broke on the hard unyielding fact. The chief narrative threads are relatively few: we know of the death trains, the missing women, the lost homes, livelihoods and so on.

In this memoir of Partition all those tropes and more recur, all in one child’s recollections of the 1940s. Maloy Krishna Dhar, who spent 30 years as an Intelligence Bureau officer in India, was born in east Bengal to a zamindar or “mahashay” family, and grew up in a time of change. He watched his family’s local influence stretch and at last break, as national politics distorted local reality. His own family members diverged along political lines; his father joined the Forward Bloc without shedding his love for the tolerant, shared Bengali culture of the delta, while his grandfather, head of the family, refused to acknowledge the possibility of change, insisting upon loyalty to the government. The father spent much of his time away from the family’s rural stronghold, while the grandfather remained in his room, nurturing his opium habit.

But family politics are only a small part of this sprawling tale squeezed into 300 pages. As a boy Dhar more or less ran free, and he writes with warmth and close recall about the many friends and accomplices from every caste and class of the village that he spent his time with. Some are women — the most memorable characters are all women — who take no subordinate role in the local violent activism against the British and in support of Subhas Bose’s INA. Naturally, the presence of fiery and defiant women requires that later the author must describe the crimes committed against them once sectarianism and anti-zamindar feeling explode into violence, pitting Bengali against Bengali.

Eventually even his idealistic father must give in, and after Partition Dhar’s family finally evacuates to Calcutta, where they live in much-reduced circumstances. The train to India of the title is both an object and a metaphor, for the journey from old Bengal to new India. Yet even in Calcutta the flow of anecdote which accompanies the author’s chaotic coming of age doesn’t cease; the city is awash with small tragedies. The tale ends with the death of Dhar’s father, and a page or two later Dhar ends the book with a brief paean to the old independent spirit of Bengal, visible again to him on the threshold of the 1971 war.

Because it ticks all the boxes as a Partition lament, one is left with lingering doubts (fair or not) about truthfulness. How can the author recall conversations in such detail? Inevitably, some encounters feel mildly glamourised, touched up perhaps to accentuate the sense of loss. One guesses also at painstaking editing, because Dhar’s freelance articles for newspapers and the “Author’s Note” to this book show him to have a much clunkier prose style in his other non-fiction. Or it may be that, writing about things close to his heart, in this memoir the author works at the peak of his ability. Either way, this is a book worth reading.

(Visit the publisher’s page for this book. Dhar has written a number of books on Pakistan, Indian intelligence and espionage, etc., which are listed on his website.)

OVERLEAF 56

Admittedly, Jawaharlal Nehru was there at the start of things, the end of an age, the awakening of a nation, that tryst with destiny. So he and others of his generation were better placed than we are to think laterally, to explore all of history for models towards which to incline the path of our future. He also spent years in prison, an enforced separation from the bustle and fire of the freedom movement which enabled him to look beyond the constrained present to the past and future, all in the service of his country. In other words, he used his time in prison to think big for India.

He spent five months of a three-year jail term in the mid-1940s, during the Second World War and at the height of the Quit India Movement, composing The Discovery of India, an extended meditation on history, India’s place in it, and likelihoods as well as lessons for the future. “I have covered a thousand hand-written pages with this jumble of ideas in my mind,” he writes near the end and, running out of paper — which was acquired only with difficulty in prison — he still languishes for a satisfactory conclusion. “The discovery of India — what have I discovered? It was presumptuous of me to imagine that I could unveil her and find out what she is to-day and what she was in the long past.”

Of course it was, but that’s the point. Today hardly anyone, far less a prospective prime minister, would dare to attempt such an ambitious thought exercise. Nehru concludes as he has continued throughout the book, by reflecting that although India is vast and Indians numerous, some ties do hold this nation together and give it a “personality”. In his mind those common ties extend far back into the past — and he muses that in order to enter the modern world India must make use of those common threads rather than deny them. For instance, he says, India must shed the elaborate and stultifying superstructure of religion, which inhibits and opposes human equality and Indians’ receptivity to the fruits of science. In doing so it will not be rejecting itself but embracing a purer and older self — the one represented in earlier forms of Vedic religion, for example, or the founding principles and early practices of Islam. Thereby India will not be imitating the West but fulfilling its own destiny.

And so on. This is a creative as well as politic, if not frightfully original, method. Nehru was not really a profound thinker, nor was he a particularly brilliant prose stylist, but his honesty and the effort he expended in attaining his ideas are open for all to see. What’s more, many of the ideas laid out here and elsewhere in his published writings from before Independence were reflected in his policy programme once he took over the government — which reinforces the impression of his intellectual probity.

Today much of what discussion happens on the state of India, the uses of the past and our potential futures happens within a settled paradigm. Democracy, economy, politics, Shah Rukh, communalism, corruption, IT, Tata, interest rates, Sensex, CBSE/ICSE and things like that form the corners of our mental domain when it comes to imagining the way we are or aim to be. Nehru, partly because he was there at the start of things and partly because he had the education, intelligence and imagination for it, was able to think beyond a paradigm. We now, in comparison, are trapped and caged.

Happy birthday, Mr Nehru, and thanks for the cake.

(The portrait of Nehru at top is by Elizabeth Brunner, the Hungarian artist, from the early 1950s. There is an online exhibition of her work and that of her mother Elizabeth Sass Brunner on the IGNCA website.)

OVERLEAF 55

When was the last time you wrote a letter? A real letter, in your own hand? Not since boarding school, in my case — although there was one, just for fun, sent to a friend last year. It took 10 days to reach Mumbai. Even India Post seems to have lost its faith in letters. If I become famous in my declining years, even if only by mistake, that friend will have a sample of my state of mind circa 2008 to offer my biographers.

Letters are on my mind of late because recently published volumes offer revelations about three artistic and intellectual greats, via new or freshly translated collections of their letters. I wrote about the publication of Vincent van Gogh’s passionate and excitable letters last week in this column (here); there are also the letters of poet T S Eliot (1888-1965) and political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), who wrote the famous Democracy in America. Not quite so recently, letters relating to author Roald Dahl (1916-90), and by poet Ted Hughes (1930-98), also have revealed aspects of each writer’s life and nature that had thus far remained hidden to those who knew them only through their published writings and interviews.

In each of these cases, and in many others (letters are an ancient literary genre), readers are interested not chiefly for prurient reasons but because, no surprise, these brilliant artists were nearly as brilliant in their personal communications as they were in their professional work. Even if the subject was mundane — money and material preoccupied van Gogh in many of his letters — when one puts that letter alongside the many others, and then compares them with the artist’s life trajectory, something larger than either emerges: life becomes art, and a legitimate subject of study and fascination. Poor them, wholly consumed by their audience at last, but lucky us.

Where the mere facts are sufficiently striking, even the things we thought we knew for sure are thrown into doubt: was Ted Hughes really so awful to his martyred poetess wife Sylvia Plath? He lived on for decades after her 1963 suicide while opprobrium rained down on him from feminists and academics. Was it all deserved? His letters, published in 2007, suggest not. Was T S Eliot really so foul to his first wife, and was he after all an anti-Semite? Again, his letters, just published, suggest not. And in the case of Roald Dahl, this author of clever, subversive children’s books was revealed last year, via a cache of letters found in America, to have been a British spy in the wartime USA, and to have slept with dozens of women including Clare Boothe Luce, wife of Henry Luce, the pathbreaking publisher of Time-Life-Fortune, all for king and country.

Tocqueville, writing home to France during his travels in America in the 1830s, composed long letters — “The thicker a letter, the less liable it is to go astray” — intended to be read aloud to family and friends, and as travel notes for his own use. (Here are some extracts.) Hughes, on the other hand, told his lover Assia Wevill, who was in the habit of keeping his letters: “I’m foolishly oppressed enough as it is with bloody eavesdroppers & filchers & greedy curiosity, & if you’re going to be sitting on all that for some Suzette suddenly to lay her hands on, then I can’t write freely.” But he did write, truthfully and without artifice. One doesn’t feel awkward reading even the most intimate of his letters. And van Gogh wrote directly, never imagining there would be other readers.

Reader: enjoy this wealth while it lasts. The epistolary age is drawing to an end. Electronic communications, though more numerous, lack the ceremony and pent-up reward of a letter. And what can you learn about the author from a flickering screen? Nothing compared to the many confessions of a handwritten letter.

OVERLEAF 54

Deprived of finer speech, my chief utterance during the time I spent reading van Gogh’s letters was: “Oh, this is brilliant… this is brilliant… brilliant…” It isn’t as often as one would like that one’s reading matter is of such quality as to interrupt one’s respiration, and even less often that form, substance and function come together so satisfyingly as they have in the latest, and finest, edition of the great artist’s collected letters.

Vincent’s letters (the informal is surely allowable) are no secret. They’ve been in circulation for more than a century. The credit for that, as for the amazing PR job that rocketed him to the first ranks of fame so soon after his death, belongs to Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, the widow of Vincent’s younger brother Theo, who died soon after his brother did. The two are buried together in the cemetery of Auvers-sur-Oise, a suburb of Paris. The graves of the two men, at the instance of Theo’s beloved wife, wear a shared blanket of ivy, binding them together in death as in life.

About 900 letters from 1872 to 1890 survive which were either written by or addressed to Vincent, of which the vast majority, about 700, were exchanged between the brothers. Theo was Vincent’s rock. For most of the artist’s painting years, which means the last decade of his life (he shot himself at 37), Theo, a moderately successful art dealer, regularly sent his brother money and painting materials. Because Vincent had no close friends, nor any real lover, he poured out his thoughts and accounts of his work and troubles in the letters to Theo.

As several reviewers have said, there is no better artistic autobiography in existence. Unlike other historical letter-writers, Vincent had clearly never thought of publication. The letters are unpolished and often messy documents, yet tumbling with ideas and emotions. They reveal the range of Vincent’s reading (astonishingly broad) and how he taught himself to understand as well as do art (by hard work; he wasn’t a born talent).

Some 242 letters contain simple sketches (“croquis”) by which Vincent showed Theo how he was progressing. Many offer a glimpse into the process that led to a painting — including some of van Gogh’s most famous, like The Potato Eaters (1885).

Indeed, so important are the letters that they helped create van Gogh’s reputation as an artist, no less, one might hazard, than his art. They are memorable partly because they are so readable — Vincent’s words are as vigorous as his paintings. But so far we have not had a truly complete and accurate collection. Theo’s widow had a set published, but of course some material was excised and the whole was cleaned up to read well. In 1958 an English translation from the original Dutch and French was published, but it was similarly flawed.

Now, after 15 years of labour, experts from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which has the largest collection of his artwork and most of the letters, with the support of the Huygens Institute have contextualised the letters with a framework of incredibly substantial research. Vincent van Gogh — The Letters (Thames & Hudson, £325) shows each letter, full size, surrounded by the details one needs to fully understand the words. This includes notes on every individual, book and event mentioned and images of any painting referred to. One gets a virtual picture of the components of van Gogh’s thinking at that moment — gets inside his head, so to speak.

The editors (Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker) and the Museum, with great generosity of spirit, have made the entire book available online, free, at VanGoghletters.org. It is the best-designed website I have seen in years, beautiful and easy to negotiate. Reading Vincent there is what took my breath away.

(Here’s another archive of van Gogh’s letters in an older translation, searchable in some ways, with some annotations, and with a useful “calendar of letters”. It isn’t as fresh in its language, however, nor as comprehensive in its backgrounding.)

In her latest fervid essays Arundhati Roy unmasks the evil in Union and Progress

Tolerance is bred deep among Indians: we are told this ancient verity by both “secularists” and “communalists”. After all (the story goes), most Indians daily rub shoulders with a variety of other Indians from apparently different social or cultural categories. For the most part, we muddle along well enough together — well enough to share a country and a civilisational outlook.

This may be true, but the fact is probably overstated. Reality shows up the weak spots in the national fabric, and one of the weakest (I can’t figure out whether it is a cause or an effect, or both) is unimaginativeness. Lack of imagination keeps one Indian from appreciating the conditions of another’s life, even allowing for asymmetric information flows. Among the better-off classes, the dullness is made worse by self-satisfaction.

You’ve heard this sort of left-wing whingeing before, when it may even have been fashionable, but don’t sigh in irritation now — read Arundhati Roy’s latest book. It is a collection of past essays, “many of them written in anger, at moments when keeping quiet became harder than saying something”. Inspired by such national tests as Kashmir, the Gujarat pogroms of 2002, the Parliament attack of 2001, the Mumbai attacks of last year, knee-jerk nationalism, POTA, police brutality, corruption in the judiciary, the broad right-wing (she calls it fascist) fringe, the willingly suborned news media, and so on, Roy makes the point that the one thing we Indians are developing a tolerance to is the lies told to us by those who would rule us.

In her eyes that ruling clique is not just the organs and arms of the state, though it is above all them, but includes urban upper-class India. We accept the lies — such as that all anti-state elements are nihilistic terrorists, such as that there is only one serious path of “development” — because they are convenient and excuse us from any responsibility for having brought these forces to life.

The lies, she says, also allow us to still (and then drain away) the thin waters — as opposed to the rich cream — of the lower classes. Meaning that we of the privileged classes, on whose behalf the state really works, can cast opponents of the dominant model of development as anti-national as well as anti-progress. The formula applies to tribals trying to keep mining companies out of their ancestral forests as much as it does to Kashmiris fighting the occupation of their land by half a million Indian troops. Any acquiescence, Roy says, is either born of hopelessness or it is manufactured.

And this duplicity is bad, ultimately, for the rulers — not just because it papers over dissent in an attempt to delay it, so the wounds fester and deepen, but because it rots our souls.

Roy can be a most annoying presenter, when she is not focused. Her passion results in a prose that is sometimes so overheated that it fuses. The very first lines of the book are pain-inducing: “While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy?” Eh? And then there is that clumsy metaphor about cream and water.

But in this case the worst goes first — things get better once she seizes her topic. Right at the start she states her core argument: that many crimes are committed in India and other democratic countries in the name of Union and Progress, a.k.a. Nationalism and Development, which are the “unimpeachable twin towers” of modern Free Market Democracy (her capitalisation). Then her essays reveal how she sees the dirty process working in each of the various intertwined crises listed above.

This is the fact-rich meat of the book. You may have come across these pieces before, but seeing them assembled together is a revelation because, for one, it proves how much can be learned from sources in the public domain, if you take the trouble to find them. The facts render official narratives at least suspect, sometimes preposterous, and occasionally sinister. Yet reporters and anchors parrot these very narratives. The clear conclusion is that the news media are lazy, cowardly, venal and stupid. Most ordinary consumers of news, and many journalists, will agree.

To Roy, it’s not any one aspect of the state that is rotten and dangerous — it is the whole edifice. This is no democracy, she says. Joining the dots between current events and systemic troubles, she extends the lines to the horizon — where she sees fascism and genocide. The truth is that horizon is nearer than we might think, though perhaps not so near as Roy thinks.

Pointing out the bad things, as Roy does, has value because it shows what remains that is good. In her idealistic vision, the good is that India still offers other, traditional, non-Western, non-capitalist ways of living. That’s a weak sort of salvation, to be sure, but I for one am immeasurably grateful to my forebears that the choice is there at all.

Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy
Arundhati Roy
Penguin
pp xxxviii + 252

OVERLEAF 53

“I think of Asterix as a comic version of wily Odysseus,” says the brilliant translator Anthea Bell of the subject of her best-known work, the ancient Gaulish warrior whose village, frozen in 50 BCE, still and forever holds out against Julius Caesar’s Roman legions. Frankly JC doesn’t have a chance of completing his conquest of Gaul so long as Asterix and the rest of the villagers can count on the magic potion brewed by the druid Getafix, which gives them supernatural strength. Obelix, Asterix’s best friend, doesn’t need any potion at all — because he fell into a cauldron of it when he was a baby. Obelix loves beating up Romans.

I’m sure you know all this — you, like nearly everybody else who enjoys comics (and as children, at least, we all seem to), will probably be perfectly familiar with René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s masterpieces. You may even be alarmingly nerdy about them — a surprising number of people break into noises from Asterix and his Francophone fellow, Hergé’s Tintin, at the mildest provocation. Captain Haddock’s “Billions of blue blistering barnacles!” is virtually a nerd signature tune, as might be the Obelixian “These Romans are crazy!” accompanied by the “Toc! Toc! Toc!” of finger hitting forehead.

But that Bell quote at the top of this column indicates that there’s something else going on, something longer-term and deeper-rooted than spunky Gauls and cloddish Romans locked in a comic embrace for the entertainment of moderns. That something is history.

Neither Goscinny nor Uderzo was native-born French — one’s parents were Polish-Jewish and the other’s Italian — but both responded to the times in France. Asterix first appeared in the French comics magazine Pilote (1, 2, 3) in October 1959 (which makes him 50 years old this month). In an essay on the translation of Asterix, Anthea Bell writes: “Originally the idea was to make Asterix a genuinely heroic Gaul — a huge hunk of a warrior. Then René Goscinny thought it would be more amusing to make him small and weedy in appearance, apparently insignificant but in fact very cunning, and Albert Uderzo then came up with the idea of his inseparable friend Obelix who is indeed big and enormously strong, but is far from bright, and endearingly childlike.”

So the conventional hero gave way to unconventional ones. It was an apt and timely choice. In the early 1960s, when Asterix was already famous, Charles de Gaulle was president and France was on its way to some sort of rebirth after the humiliations of the Second World War. In their determination to protect their own identity and uniqueness against the forces of uniformity and the rest of the world, for the French the idea of one village keeping its independence against an empire was extraordinarily resonant.

“[In] the same way as all British children know about William the Conqueror and 1066 and all that,” writes Bell, “every French child’s first history book is supposed to begin with a remark about ‘Our ancestors the Gauls’. Their ancestors the Gauls were brave and noble and (like the real historical chieftain Vercingetorix) stood up to Julius Caesar and his invading Roman army.” Goscinny had aimed to gently mock the French self-image, but the affectionate caricature turned out to be all too appealing.

Identifying more reasons for Asterix’s popularity, Bell writes in another essay that “all of us in [Western] Europe enjoy making anachronistic fun of the past”. Well, that’s not true of us in India. Our history is still dreadfully current. Who would an Indian Asterix be? Which invader could we safely pick to lampoon, as Goscinny-Uderzo did the Romans? Not the Turks and Mongols: too risky. Not the Europeans: they hired Indians to fight for them. Corporations against tribals? Too raw. Communalists against secularists? Heavy-handed. The only safe choice is some version of Porus against Alexander’s Greeks — but that has little or no meaning today.

Nor do we have the sense of irony that comes from a settled relationship with our past. Without that, irony has no foundation, and without irony humour remains more or less weak, shallow and short-lived. We can’t have an Indian Asterix because it won’t be funny.