OVERLEAF 102

Six days after it opened, three months ago, I happened by the Spell & Bound Bookshop & Café in SDA Market, a prosperous corner of South Delhi. The market has restaurants and coffee places and one of the better-stocked thekas in the city. Primed by years of Harry Potter products, my eye was instantly captured by Spell & Bound’s forest-green and olde-worlde facade, with its promise of cosiness and warm bookery.

It was nice inside, too. One enters the middle level, which is stocked with new titles and bits of backlist — the books that have lasted. Down a spiral staircase is a broad basement with children’s books, coffee-table books, poetry, travel titles and so on. In no case, when I first went, was any genre yet well-stocked enough to be satisfying.

Up the staircase is a narrow mezzanine like the dining car of a small train. This (along with a table or two on the verandah outside the shop) is the café area, where one can buy fairly inexpensive rolls and soft drinks. Food is by The Kathi and coffee by Depaul’s, both of which have several outlets in Delhi.

All this was ready on the sixth day.

About three weeks ago I went back there to meet Kanika Kapoor, one of the two young founders. The place looked more lived-in, and she told me that it was being frequented by students from IIT Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, both close by. IIT’s English debating club had adopted Spell & Bound’s basement, she said, as one of its debate venues. In the evening someone with a guitar was liable to settle on the verandah to strum. The shop was getting repeat customers and had even started home delivery. Kapoor spoke of planning a magnetic swipe card to help track the interest areas of their customers. She said 20-25 per cent of their human traffic came to them via Facebook — because they had not bothered with a PR agency and press coverage.

The collection had improved. There was a good set of children’s books, some of them otherwise not often seen on Indian shop shelves, including poetry for children. Many were American titles. The range of books for adults, while still not very good, had grown deeper and better.

To me this looked like a heartening example of how a new bookshop could make space for itself in a market that is not kind to small retailers. The owners had chosen to be general-interest, yet developed a few focuses, and were positioning themselves as “lifestyle”.

Two days ago I spoke with Aseem Vadehra, Kapoor’s business partner and co-owner. He told me that as of a month ago, no more than two months after it opened, Spell & Bound is on its way to becoming a chain. Kapoor and Vadehra have joined with Satyam Cineplexes to put books booths in multiplex lobbies. Popcorn, cola, books! The first booth is at the Nehru Place cineplex; a second is in the works; more are expected.

“Chainification” is spreading through the bookselling business in India. The big chains, like Landmark, Crossword and Oxford Bookstore have been around for a while. What’s new is that even single-outlet, once old-fashioned bookshops are chainifying themselves. Look at Strand Book Stall of Mumbai, which has metastasised out of Fort, Mumbai, and spread onto IT campuses in Bangalore-Mysore. Look at Full Circle Books, and Bahrisons Book Shop. Both are now small chains whose owners have diverse interests in publishing. There is Om Book Shop. There is Roli Books, which has gone from a wily small publisher to two incipient chains: CMYK, for expensive art books, and Half-Price Bookstore, for discount books — of which just one is open but more planned.

It’s not the growth that’s surprising, but the pace, ambition, and willingness to think like a modern business. The romance is just about gone from the Indian books world, but — who’d have thought? — the business magic is flooding in.

It’s as familiar and as timeless as morning chai, this kind of bookshop: owned by three generations of the same family; current owner-manager elderly, knowledgeable and forgiving; opened its doors before the British departed; a short roster of illustrious customers and regulars tending toward the cultured rather than the merely famous; stacks of eccentrically placed books making it not terribly easy to find the book you want, but that book not being the point of your visit… There are so many of these, you may think. Every city and town with any pretension to a literary life has such bookshops, from Lucknow and Darjeeling up.

The specific one described above is Bangalore’s Select Bookshop, off Brigade Road. It belongs to the legendary Mr Murthy. A young regular tells how during one visit — a visit to Select typically lasts hours and climaxes with one or two happy finds — a friend of the owner’s happened to dawdle by. Mr Murthy turned to this customer and told him, “Just sit here for five minutes. I’ll go have a cup of coffee.” The customer was nonplussed: “But what if someone wants to buy something?” “Then sell it to him, no.” Five minutes turned to 45, and in the interim two sales had been made.

Heartwarming, for sure. But how much longer can there be bookshops and booksellers like this? Who has the time to browse for hours? Even Mr Murthy’s young customer now guiltily goes instead to Blossom Book House, a three-storey, decade-old colossus of used books — big, ruthlessly organised, sternly priced, and without Select’s character though conveniently located in the same area.

The future for the old-style, owner-managed, single outlet bookshop is not looking bright. Because they are usually old businesses with old customers, paying rent at old rates, these bookshops are still making do. Once their owners retire, however, the next generation will either be more entrepreneurial or get out of the business altogether.

The pathbreaking Strand Book Stall, for instance, founded in the 1940s by the late, gentlemanly T N Shanbhag (said to be the first in India to offer customers a flat discount of 20 per cent), has grown from one outlet in Fort, Mumbai, to a chain based in Bangalore, under his daughter Vidya Virkar. Strand without Shanbhag has less character, but is a more effective modern business.

While the old-timers straggle on, there is one significant recent loss: the New & Secondhand Bookshop of Dhobi Talao, Mumbai, where generations of young professionals began their book-buying careers. Opened in 1905 and run by three generations of the Vishram family, it closed in February this year, reportedly because it wasn’t selling enough books. The blank shutters stand as a rebuke to passersby on this busy corner.

Logically, there should be several things going for the independent bookseller. He knows his clientele. He doesn’t have to pay for his stock until it sells. If a book sells, he gets a margin of 15-40 per cent. If it doesn’t sell, it goes back to the publisher, at no cost to the retailer. The author and publisher do all the hard work of marketing.

The modern books trade undercuts these advantages. Since the 1980s in the West and for the past decade in India, publishers have tended to focus on bestselling books and authors. The idea was to support less profitable but worthy titles with the flood of cash and publicity that the bestsellers bring — but, naturally, cash has a logic of its own. Because marketing and media coverage focus on the (potential) hits, bookshops have to stock all this “frontlist” from a growing number of publishers. The “backlist“, that is, older titles still in print, gets less and less retail space and visibility.

This creates two problems for the old-style general-interest booksellers. One, the backlist is their strength. Their loyal repeat customers, after all, are not always looking for the latest title. Two, if everyone is selling the same bestselling book, the customer will buy it wherever is cheapest and most convenient. This may be at a big-box chain store like Landmark in a mall or Crossword in a prosperous neighbourhood market, or with a click of the mouse online, where the buyer is likely to get a tempting discount. With his small volumes and limited shelf space, the independent bookseller cannot easily compete.

“Online stores have a number of advantages, such as the number of titles they can deliver, and they have very low storage costs,” says Prakash Gangaram, owner of the well-known Gangarams Book Bureau in Bangalore. “They don’t need to worry about dead stock or pilferage. For a [bricks-and-mortar] retailer, the overheads are much higher. In a store you can pick up only what’s available.”

Nalini Chettur, owner of Giggles, a tiny and well-liked bookshop (“Biggest little bookshop”, the board outside the 100 sq ft room reads) in a corner of Chennai’s Taj Connemara hotel, is fatalistic. “There is absolutely no future for bookshops,” she says. “It’s very hard to compete with the huge discounts offered by the online players, who don’t have any overheads.” She does not care for contemporary popular fiction. But she does have a USP: herself. Chettur knows every title on her shelves, will recommend books to her customers and even source and send books by post. She gives a small discount to loyal customers or those buying many items. “The indifference of large bookstores, particularly the staff who usually don’t know much beyond searching for a title on the computer,” she adds, “has helped me a lot.”

The key to viability for independent booksellers like Chettur — apart from the “authentic” bookshop experience and serendipity, finding books one isn’t looking for — appears to be focus. Chettur offers personalised service; others choose a subject area or market niche. Half of Gangaram’s stock, for example, is academic reference books. In Delhi, Fact & Fiction in Vasant Vihar, run by Ajit Vikram Singh, is known to have strengths in philosophy, poetry, travel and literary fiction. But he, too, is not optimistic. “It will get progressively harder to compete,” he says in cultured tones. “We don’t have the range.”

Nor, he insists, are there growing numbers of buyers. Despite the aggressive marketing of books and authors in the lifestyle and entertainment media, he says no more readers walk into his shop than used to, say, 10 years ago. (Even so, this reporter found Fact & Fiction busy on a Wednesday afternoon and counted four sales in half an hour. Each buyer picked up at least two books.) Singh said that of the Rs 8,000 crore the Indian books industry makes every year — this is the commonest of the figures in circulation, and refers to English-language publishing — no more than Rs 500-600 crore is from sales of trade books, from all the major publishers in the country combined. The remaining Rs 7,500 crore is believed to be earned in the murky and fiercely competitive textbook market.

“Ten thousand copies of a locally printed book,” Singh says dismissively, “is considered a bestseller in a country of our size.” His single-room shop, stacked from floor to ceiling, contains “eight or ten thousand books”.

But you have to set such arguments against all the major publishers’ claimed growth rates (for several years now) of 20-25 per cent. Also, Singh’s bookshop is located in a market that is fighting a losing battle with three big new malls nearby. One of those malls hosts a Landmark chain store that is about 80 times the size of Fact & Fiction, by square footage, and stocks some 120,000 titles. Many parts of the books industry, if not the independent booksellers, are growing.

What about discounts offered by online retailers — are they a big competitive disadvantage? “I don’t think discounts are the only issue,” says Singh. “The main issue here is online bookstores are selling books which cannot legally be imported through the books channel.”

He means that, now that the biggest Western publishing groups have set up directly owned subsidiaries in India (Penguin, HarperCollins, Random House, Hachette, and so on), all books published abroad by any company owned by these parent groups can be brought to India only through their local subsidiaries. This means, says Singh, that booksellers like him have access only to what the local subsidiaries of overseas publishers will sell here. He has little choice but to carry books from the same, limited pool of titles. If a customer asks for something else, Singh cannot provide it — unlike, as he points out, an online retailer like Flipkart.com, that can source books directly from, say, the USA, which is the biggest publishing market in the world. That negates Singh’s USP as a specialist provider, not to mention his profit on the dollar or sterling price of a directly imported title.

Other small or once-small retailers have figured out that they need to think bigger, and to pair their books business with something else more lucrative. This is especially true in Delhi. Anuj Bahri, of the small Delhi-based Bahrisons Book Shop chain, also runs, solo, a literary agency called Red Ink. Young entrepreneurs Kanika Kapoor and Aseem Vadehra this year opened the Spell & Bound Bookshop & Café in Delhi’s Safdarjung Development Area market, joining books and snacks; they have extra space for children’s books, a known growth area. Midland The Book Shop (sic) is not exactly a chain but has four brothers in the same business in different locations around Delhi, which gives them local strength. They offer a standard 20 per cent discount. They also supply institutional libraries and handle distribution for some publishers.

Strand’s Vidya Virkar is building her chain on an IT foundation, setting up bookshops on the campuses of IT companies Infosys and Wipro, where she can be sure of a captive clientele. Strand also has an annual book festival, which helps pull in customers.

Roli Books publisher Pramod Kapoor is aiming to build not one but two chains — CMYK, whose USP is art and architecture books (“Art books are difficult to buy online, you have to see them in physical form”) with an outlet each in Delhi and Pune, and the Half-Price Bookstore, discount books, with one outlet so far in a Delhi mall (“a success”). It is modelled on the big American chain, Half-Price Books, with the owners of which Kapoor says he has a long-standing business relationship. “I’m ready to open 50 stores if I had the capital,” Kapoor says. “I’m quite bullish.”

Landmark, the largest books retailer in India by volume and sales (over Rs 200 crore), is a subsidiary of Trent, part of the Tata Group. Landmark is also hedging its bets. It has 17 large outlets nationwide, up to 45,000 sq ft each. Although books are still its most visible “product category”, as COO Ashutosh Pandey explains, Landmark gets just 30-40 per cent of its revenue from books and music combined. The rest comes from other “core categories” like films, stationery, “tech accessories” and computer games and consoles. Pandey points out that Landmark has the traditional bookshop advantage of backlist (what he calls the “tail”), and backlist titles don’t need discounting. Nevertheless, next month Landmark will start a three-for-two offer, for some new and popular titles, where the customer can pay for two books and take away three — what Pandey calls a net 33 per cent discount.

As a whole, however, Landmark is cannily turning itself into a “leisure and lifestyle” business. Its next “core category” may be sporting gear. All of which sounds like a threat to more than small booksellers.

As for Flipkart.com, the e-business that has set off so much concern for the future in real-world books retail, CEO and co-founder Sachin Bansal explains, via e-mail, “Books were an obvious choice to begin our foray into ecommerce. Books cost considerably less as compared to products like electronic items and as a result, it is easier for a first-time customer to trust us with books and make that initial purchase from an unknown site.”

No longer unknown — Bansal says his company sells six books a minute now, up four times from 2,000 a day early last year. Books contribute only half his revenue; the rest comes from newer categories like music, movies, games, computers, mobiles, and so on. “The collection of books on Flipkart is to the tune of 10 million titles,” Bansal says — impossible for any bricks-and-mortar bookseller, no matter how large, to match. Even so, he allows that “Online is not a substitute for people who love the experience of leisurely browsing through books before they make a buy. That is still best done offline.”

It will be years before e-business overtakes real-world books retail in India, everyone involved agrees. Publishers are not all certain of the ratio, but online sales in India are nowhere more than 20 per cent of total book sales, and typically less than half that. The old-fashioned nature of the book as an object, the slow act of consuming a book, and the kind of person who makes a regular books buyer are reasonable safeguards for the near future of bricks-and-mortar bookselling. It’s only the old-style, purist, generalist booksellers — still the soul of the trade — that may not outlast the current generation. Go see Mr Murthy of Select while you can.

With inputs from Indulekha Aravind in Delhi, Praveen Bose in Bangalore and Arghya Ganguly in Mumbai

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A different (and considerably shorter) version of this essay was published in my paper. In that version another reporter had inserted discount figures that were incorrect because they don’t represent the industry as a whole.

On the whole, now, I’m not sure that the thesis of this article is sustainable. There are book lovers and eccentrics in every generation, after all; it’s quite possible that as incomes rise and (if) the taste for reading spreads then the market and affinity for small generalist booksellers will recreate itself. I think Spell & Bound, in particular, is a harbinger of things to come — its young and optimistic (and well off) owners have put down roots in an upscale market patronised by prosperous South Delhiites and students from IIT and JNU. If it doesn’t flop it may well improve with age. Either way, however, it will be too late for the legendary, ageing booksellers of today.

OVERLEAF 99

Back in the summer holidays of 1990, not yet 13 years old, I sat down to write a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev. He was then still General Secretary and head of state, and beloved of Time and Newsweek, which came regularly to my school reading room.

I wrote about myself and my family, that we liked the movies shown at the Soviet Cultural Centre, that my brother attended the Botvinnik Chess Academy, that we read Progress Publishers books. A sheaf of pages in, I still hadn’t done what I had started out to — to thank the General Secretary for being a good man, for giving proof that the world could be a better place today than it was yesterday, for never looking like he wanted all the credit. I was not sure enough of myself to say what I felt. So I never sent the letter.

Foolish, childish, romantic? No, not very. In the newest issue of Foreign Policy journal there is a terrific essay titled “Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong”. It is by Leon Aron, who works at an American conservative think tank. Aron points out that in the early 1980s, not long before the Soviet Union collapsed, nobody seriously expected it to. Economic indicators were not robust, but nor were they dangerously weak. Dissidents were quiet, geopolitics were relatively stable. The loosening of control in the USSR began, says Aron, not by popular demand but from the very top, from Gorbachev and his close colleagues.

“[T]hough economic betterment was their banner,” he writes, “Gorbachev and his supporters first set out to right moral, rather than economic, wrongs. Most of what they said publicly in the early days of perestroika now seems no more than an expression of their anguish over the spiritual decline and corrosive effects of the Stalinist past. It was the beginning of a desperate search for answers to the big questions with which every great revolution starts: What is a good, dignified life? What constitutes a just social and economic order? What is a decent and legitimate state? What should such a state’s relationship with civil society be?”

He quotes Gorbachev’s prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov: “[We] stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the reports, in newspapers, from high podiums, wallowed in our lies, hung medals on one another. And all of this — from top to bottom and from bottom to top.” He quotes the foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze: “Everything is rotten. It has to be changed.” He quotes Gorbachev: democratisation is “not a slogan but the essence of perestroika“.

Ideas, Aron says, brought the Soviet state down, but only because openness from the top enabled openness at the bottom. The “merciless moral scrutiny” of their history by Soviet leaders and citizens “within a few short years hollowed out the mighty Soviet state, deprived it of legitimacy, and turned it into a burned-out shell that crumbled in August 1991” — 20 years ago this year.

That is to skip a step, however. Between opening and crumbling, as Aron says, was this popular realisation: “Enough! We cannot live like this any longer!” Not coincidentally, “Dignity before bread!” was a recent Tunisian protest slogan. Egyptians in Tahrir Square said they felt humiliated by Hosni Mubarak’s government. It’s not economics, says Aron, but people awakening to the idea of dignity that makes authoritarian governments weak.

I got into an argument about Anna Hazare with my father, who reads a lot of history. You never know, he said, his fast might trigger popular anger and appetite for rapid change. Rubbish, I said, this is small potatoes. But now, having read Leon Aron and remembered my own childish but intuitive reaction to Mikhail Gorbachev, I wonder.

Walking

Of course this is a pilgrimage. Colin Thubron walks two weeks from remote western Nepal to the Tibet border, is carried by SUV to the foot of Mt Kailash and then performs the kora or circumambulation of that holy mountain. He says he is impelled by a cold secular fact — the recent death of his mother, his last living relative — rather than religious awe and a desire to gain merit. He is a travel writer, one of the very best; so, add professional curiosity. What is unusual about multiple motives?

But Thubron, now in his 70s, appears to struggle with the idea. His other books are travel narratives and novels. In 2000 he told the Guardian, “When I finish a travel book I want to write some fiction. Equally, after writing a novel I want to go out, meet a billion Chinese people or something like that.” So each completed work is the cause of the next, from travel to fiction and back again.

Here, by contrast, Thubron is stumped on page 9 by a question from his Nepali porter. Iswor, a young man of 27, has just told Thubron he works to earn enough to marry, even if it will take years. “And you?” Iswor asks, “Why are you doing this, travelling alone?”

To a Mountain in Tibet, by Colin Thubron, Random House, pp viii + 228

“I am doing this on account of the dead,” Thubron writes, though at the time he didn’t know what answer to make. In his other books Thubron says next to nothing about himself or the motives, other than professional and intellectual, that propel him. He has written about Damascus, Lebanon, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Istanbul, the Venetians, Brezhnev’s Russia, Deng’s China, Central Asia, the countries along the ancient Silk Road, post-Soviet Siberia. This pilgrimage to Mt Kailash is, comparatively, a mere outing, though he is old to be making this trek.

His first trip to China, for example, which resulted in Behind the Wall (1987), happened because the country had begun to open to the West.

Thubron went because he wanted to understand the Cultural Revolution and its impact on China’s people. He was rattling those skeletons even before his aeroplane touched down in Beijing.

That is a clear motive. Here in To a Mountain in Tibet, however, Thubron cannot be just observer. He is also participant. As in all pilgrimages, the more important journey takes place inside the pilgrim’s mind.

In Nepal, Thubron stops at the isolated monastery of Yalbang. Monasteries and monks are a recurring feature in his travel writing. He talks to Yalbang’s abbot, asking about his family and how the tiny community of monks holds together. Family is another theme, particularly in this book. Thubron meets monks who have left their homes behind and given themselves to their teacher or spiritual path. He reflects on “their lightness, their lack of need”, and then writes about the sad task of sorting through the possessions of his dead mother. (His father died years before.)

He found his parents’ love letters, and not without hesitation read them. They reveal a couple he had not quite known; they sharpen his sense of loss, and the photographs blur his sense of linear time. He is at this point passing through the high, empty borderlands where hard work barely guarantees survival. Thubron’s sentences grow tight and freighted, as if the body’s fight against altitude and misery manifests in his words.

This happens again, more spectacularly, on the very flanks of Mt Kailash. Here Thubron abandons descriptiveness altogether; instead he moves like a religious pilgrim through a landscape filled with meaning. A steep rock face here is described in an old guide book he carries as being like “the north wall of the Eiger from Grindelwald”, in the Alps.

He writes: “Grindelwald was where my sister died, killed by an avalanche at the age of twenty-one. Between rock and snow, skiing.” And once more his sentences grow short and sheer. “We are climbing into near-darkness.” He has always been precise and economical, but this is not native Thubron. It is astonishing that he hits such notes.

The weary conflictedness of the author — orphaned, adrift, alone — shapes this sharp, sorrowful book. Every great book on the Himalayas shares its aspect of pilgrimage. But not every writer is as comfortable with an absence of conclusion. The immediate comparison is with Peter Matthiessen‘s immortal but less bleak The Snow Leopard (1978), about another pilgrimage after loss where the objective was not attained. That book took me a year to read. Every moment seemed important. Thubron’s book is less generous, and reveals perhaps the greater vulnerability, but like Matthiessen’s it is written to last.

OVERLEAF 87

September 1998 was a good month. That month, Google first went live. Already by the end of the year it had been praised by PC Magazine as having “an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results”. Also in September 1998, the Arts & Letters Daily website went live. ALDaily, too, was a near-instant hit.

Google quickly became as commonplace as furniture, as useful and almost as invisible. That was its success. ALDaily, however, I fell hopelessly in love with. Where Google was a search engine, ALDaily was a “found” engine, and it had an uncanny knack for returning extremely satisfying finds. I am proud that I started reading it in the old days when it was still at www.cybereditions.com/aldaily, long before it moved to its current home at www.aldaily.com. Today Google processes a billion searches a day, and ALDaily gets 3 million page views a month.

ALDaily, for those who do not know, is a Web aggregator. In three vertical columns it offers three new links a day, to a notable article, book review, and essay or opinion piece, respectively. Its focus encompasses the humanities, arts and politics; but it is also narrow, because it picks from the best. Today, for example, it links to an article in the London Review of Books about the resurgence of bedbugs, in the Washington Post on the history of ballet, and in the Economist‘s Intelligent Life magazine about our “abominable” habit of verbing nouns (“Friending, trending, even evidencing and statementing…”).

Google has an algorithm to do its searching; ALDaily had, until last month, Denis Dutton. Dutton was a philosophy professor with very wide interests. Born in California in 1944 to parents who put their savings into what became a well-liked local chain of bookstores (Dutton’s Books, now closed; some user reviews), as a young man he spent two years in India in the Peace Corps. He learned to play the sitar, and then played for his meals at Indian restaurants in LA. In the 1990s he ran an annual Bad Writing Contest to “honour” the writer of the most wilfully obscurantist academic prose of the year — that was very popular. (Here‘s a piece Dutton wrote about it for the Wall Street Journal.) Long before the present ebooks craze he started an e-publishing company, Cybereditions. In 1984 he moved all the way to Christchurch, New Zealand, where he taught at the University of Canterbury until a few days before his death of prostate cancer on December 28. There has been a worldwide flurry of obituaries.

In recent years Dutton largely outsourced the searching to his colleague Tran Huu Dung. But he continued to write most of the succinct yet succulent teasers for the articles ALDaily linked to. On the day of his death the New York Review of Books tweeted that “Denis Dutton was a master of the tweet long before Twitter existed.” It then linked to ALDaily’s 1998 archive, where one finds terrific teasers like “Television is indifferent to approval or love. It pursues its only goal with unblinking zeal: to be watched”; “Was Spinoza the most lovable of men, or an emotional cripple, arrogant, consumed with sexual jealousy, and fiercely misogynistic?”; and “Dreamland: it did produce UFOs, sent to us by a mysterious alien civilization — the Pentagon”. ALDaily will continue, and I pray it stays as sharp.

Dutton, via ALDaily, gave readers more than links. By putting quality, non-specialist writing in one place, he helped create connections and inspire thought and ideas. He helped generate and support a modern, Western, Anglo-centric, global intellectual and philosophic conversation. That sounds like puff prose, but ALDaily really did that. Now there are many aggregators, though none as brilliantly minimalist; Dutton said he based the design on an 18th-century broadsheet — meaning, all the news on one sheet of paper.

Well, what can we learn? 1. An annual bad corporate/marketing prose contest might be fun (think of the horrors of PowerPoint). 2. The able writers amongst us might be more economically valuable than they think. 3. How can we let the kind of global conversation that ALDaily represents take place without us? India needs a person like Dutton to create a platform like ALDaily, to help bring the stream of our writing and thinking out of its many deep ruts and onto a more productive crossroads. It boils down, however, to the person. We don’t have a Dutton.

(The portrait of Denis Dutton at the top of this page is by Steve Jurvetson, under a Creative Commons licence.)

OVERLEAF 86

The last passenger into the plane had a large carry-on bag — large enough that there was no space left for it. An airhostess trotted up to ask him to let the staff put it in the hold instead. The passenger looked like an office-goer in his late thirties. He took the standard recourse of the thwarted Indian: milking his status. He looked down at her and spoke loudly, demanding to know why the check-in staff had not told him about this, and how inconvenient it was to be held up at arrival by having to wait for his luggage at the carousel.

The airhostess was unable to deflect the tantrum. So along came backup, in the form of a tall, uniformed member of the ground staff. Looking down at the passenger he said, sir, we don’t have any choice, yes sir, the fault is entirely ours, we should have told you, yes, it’s totally our mistake, you’re right, I’ll put your bag in the hold myself, sir, I’ll personally make sure you get it back in Delhi, sir — never mind that he wasn’t going to be there. He didn’t stop speaking or apologising. The passenger buckled, and after a last splutter (“You better make sure”) he let the bag go. Off to the hold it went, borne aloft by the victor.

Textbook angry-customer management, you might say — except for the look of amused superiority on the staffer’s face, and the unmistakeable closing equation of winner-loser. Conveying the impression of servile implacability was probably part of the steward’s winning combination, but to me the whole incident felt ugly.

I forgot about it, though, until this week a pile of 10 review copies of self-help books landed on my desk, all from Rupa Publications. Sorting them, I put the “how to make a fortune” titles in one pile, the spirituality and “how to pay less for more” titles in another pile (amounts to the same thing: the beatitude of the adept consumer), and then set aside the last three to enjoy.

First was Corporate Grooming and Etiquette by Sarvesh Gulati, one of only two titles by an Indian (the other was How to Make a Fortune on the Internet). Gulati, says the cover, has held senior-sounding posts in IT companies (that I’ve never heard of). The book is slim but compulsive. It’s full of advice on how to dress, speak, behave at parties and meetings and in the office loo, how to shake hands, sit, stand, use forks and knives and other tricky table implements, how to introduce yourself and other people, deal with travel (“Be Patient”), and so on. It’s amusing and revelatory, but peculiarly mixed period-wise: yes to tips on cellphone etiquette, but no to cutlery tips on seven-course haute-cuisine dinners.

Second was How to Succeed at Interviews, by “Dr” Rob Yeung, a ruthlessly practical guide to pulling one over on your interviewers. Dr Yeung helps companies design interviews; here he plays “gamekeeper turned poacher” and explains all the tricks. The point, per Dr Yeung, is to get the job at almost any cost to your morals. “You may be tempted to lie about your grades in future job applications,” he writes. “But be extremely careful as such facts are very easily checked by employers.” Not “Don’t lie,” but “Don’t get caught.” I loved it. Dr Yeung has an impressively broad cranium.

Last was nicest: How to Manage Difficult People, by Alan Fairweather. Fairweather explains that anyone can be difficult, and often the cause is yourself. I loved that he kept the focus on the reader, in a wholesome way. Rather than pretending to be something to “win” something, he says what works is actually being better and happier. This happens when you pay attention to your reactions, and when you have a multifaceted life. Swim, he says, read, learn to dance.

In India, we’re still stuck between two etiquette systems — the one our parents grew up with, linked to language, caste and place, and the one that is involved in doing business with the West. The result is that we master neither. Both the first two books, and especially the first, say we must convey an impression of sophistication and restraint — but only so as to get what we want. The steward on the aeroplane followed, superficially, the rules of managing difficult people. He did not put the passenger’s back up, and got him to give up his carry-on luggage. But the truth is in the bitter aftertaste — I win, you lose, sir.

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There are few things as instantly arresting as the before-and-after photograph pair. Two photos side by side become an essay in images: the beginning and end are before you, and the story lies in between. Usually one can easily fill in the story: a person has aged or had a makeover, a place has been revitalised or destroyed and rebuilt, a forest is now a shopping mall, a snowfield is now a desert…

In the last year or two a handful of shows and publications (like this one) have juxtaposed images of Himalayan glaciers from the 1950s and earlier with photos taken since 2000. The story to be filled in is, of course, the one about man-made climate change. Photographs are a good way to constructively frighten people.

So that’s how I approached Earth Then and Now: Potent Visual Evidence of Our Changing World (Hachette, 2010), a book full of before-and-after shots compiled by Fred Pearce but with a foreword by none other than James Lovelock. Lovelock is the scientist and “futurologist” who gave us the influential Gaia hypothesis in the 1960s. He named it after the Greek goddess of the Earth. Crudely put, Lovelock visualised the Earth as a self-regulating organism. What happened in one part was sure to affect the whole.

I was expecting to see, in this picture book, forests turned to suburbs, hills to open-cast mines, lakes to dustbowls. Those things are here, but there’s more besides, and this book does not allow you to fill the before-after gap with righteous outrage and contrition.

How, for example, does one assimilate a picture pair of (a) Leningrad in 1942 during the German siege, showing a woman towing a wrapped-up corpse along a frozen Nevsky Prospekt while passersby pay no attention, and (b) the same street now in St Petersburg, drearily clogged with cars and festooned with wires and advertising? Nor does the text offer relief. The operative part reads: “The Germans have long gone, but so, too, has Communism.”

Lovelock, in his foreword, says: “Natural selection picks from among the progeny those fittest to survive and that is why we are here, the latest result of Gaia’s great experiment on the effect of intelligence on survival.” Then he compares our global warming with what happened on Earth when photosynthesisers first evolved and began to release oxygen into the atmosphere. “As these algae flourished and spread,” he writes, “there must have been a massive death toll and loss of biodiversity.” But Earth adapted to oxygen, and benefited. Humans are like those algae, Lovelock says, “a life form that is very dangerous yet with near infinite promise; we are Gaia’s gamble for a more secure old age.”

It’s difficult to have so much trust while surrounded by evidence of short-term thinking. A heartstopping satellite photo pair shows a part of Saudi Arabia, first dry and empty, then dotted with immense circular fields of green, fed by water pumped from ancient underground aquifers older than the desert. Wonderful for now — but soon the water will be gone. There’s a pair of Dusseldorf in the 1990s, on the banks of a full blue Rhine, and in 2003 during a heatwave, when there is no Rhine, only a cracked wasteland. (See this page for an example not from the book.) There’s a pair of Britain in summer 2009 (green) and in January 2010, totally blanketed with snow. Extreme weather events are becoming more common.

Of course one thinks of home: imagine the North-east denuded and cultivated. It would be as bad as Bangladesh. Think of Delhi without the Yamuna — not a drop! Or Punjab with aquifers drained dry. Or Hyderabad beset by days-long duststorms. India, sadly, hardly features in this book.

But there are also photos of salutary change: in Seoul, what was a six-lane highway in 2003 is now back to being a river. The government offered in exchange a better bus service. In Boston, the $22 billion Big Dig shifted a highway underground, making space for parks, etc. Much too expensive, but a fine result. Bilbao in Spain: from industrial hellhole to knowledge industry hub. Towns flattened by war in Europe, now resurgent and still pleasingly small-scale.

And so on. The conclusion? While the natural parts of the Earth are being ruined, some of our cities are becoming better than ever: greener, cleaner, more mixed and flexible. Good for the lucky city dwellers — for now.

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So nice of President Obama to have talked to us about Mahatma Gandhi. Unfortunately he’s not in a position to do as Gandhi. Someone who is, ironically, is the future king of England. Prince Charles has a new book out, called Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, and in it he lays out his version of a Gandhian approach to saving our planet and civilisation.

Unlike Obama, Prince Charles is not cool. He is decidedly staid, not especially charismatic, and often denounced as faddish in his pursuit of “green” and “traditional” things. But the prince, unlike the president, doesn’t have to be cool.

Charles quotes Gandhi several times. There is the famous quote on Western civilisation: “It would be a very good idea.” There is also: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” There is this judicious statement: “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.” And this wise one: “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

These few lines contain the prince’s whole approach to the questions of globalisation, climate change, sustainability and happiness. The rest of the book is a detailed elaboration.

I like the book. It makes sense. It is well-written and clear, and despite obviously having been heavily ghostwritten (by Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly) it conveys a personal sense of the prince himself. It is positive, forward-looking and full of bright pictures and examples from past and present.

It is also wide-ranging. Charles says, essentially, that in the past humans had an instinctive understanding of harmony — which is the sense that everything in the universe obeys rules of proportion and balance. The Fibonacci sequence of numbers, for example, appears in apparently unconnected ways throughout nature: in the arrangement of flower petals, planetary orbits, proportions of the human body, the way fish move and rivers flow. A similar use of ratio occurs in the great cathedrals, Islamic tile art, classical music, the shape of the credit card. Notably, says Charles, science is gravitating to a rediscovery of underlying patterns, in DNA, the atom, astrophysics and so on.

Where we depart from the ancient harmonies, says Charles, we feel ill at ease and dissatisfied. He’s famous for his dislike of modern architecture, and he points out (with a curl of the lip) that few people like Modernist or Brutalist architecture — it doesn’t feel right, and he says we ought to pay attention to our instincts.

Likewise with food, farming (organic, sustainable) and economic activity. Cleverly he throws in a 1997 study that estimated the value of services provided by the environment, from pollination by bees to rain and soil: a staggering $33 trillion, when global GDP was only $18 trillion.

But the greatest value of the book is that it invites us to think again in the long term.

In the long term we cannot have more people, more wealth and more environment. Our attention should be drawn to the agricultural crisis brewing — in Punjab, for example, where chemicals no longer raise crop yields and farmers are getting cancer.

Are we oversimplifying our economic calculations? Even a neighbourhood market is an almost incomprehensibly complex ecosystem. How can we pretend to understand national and global economic activity?

In the quest for authenticity, are soulless modern offices, homes and jobs being offset by a greater appetite for organised religion, and bigger and more elaborate temples?

If things go badly, as the climate shifts and we have to pay closer attention to natural forces, will this mark a return to paganism? “O gods of rain and wind…”

It’s worrying as well as stimulating, thinking speculatively in the long term. Charles clearly does that. He quotes, prominently, this magnificent statement of Gandhi’s: “First they laugh at you, then they ignore you, then they fight you, then you win.”

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Obama meets PM. Sarkozy meets PM. Medvedev meets PM. Wen meets PM. Cameron already met PM. That makes all five heads of permanent Security Council states guests of India within a year. Good thing we did some housecleaning for the Commonwealth Games.

Historically, this is very unusual. Before modern times, rulers rarely ever met except in victory and defeat. Humayun met the Shah of Persia, but only after Sher Shah Suri had snatched his kingdom. Alexander met Porus, rajas and sultans regularly met their usurpers, the British King-Emperor received his subject Indian princes…

A ruler did not leave his realm except to enlarge it, or when he had no choice. Poor John VIII Palaiologos, the 15th-century Byzantine emperor who ruled over not much more than his capital city — he had to tour the European courts to beg for military aid against the Turks. None came, but on the other hand his visit did expose the Europeans to Greek culture and learning (and books), and therefore he helped trigger the Renaissance.

Nothing as enlightened will ensue from this sequence of imperial visits to Delhi. But they are still governed by an ancient, semi-martial script. As in the old days, where the master goes the imperial household and bodyguards follow.

Here comes Barack Obama, in effect to enlarge his realm. He brings with him 1,600 staff.* His people will take over the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai, and the Taj Palace Hotel in Delhi. The Maurya’s “Grand Presidential Floor”, where Obama will pitch his camp, according to the glossy PR brochure “instills awe and imparts a sense of divine kingship”.

What is all this but a 2010 version of the imperial Mughal tent city, the one that housed the padshah and his court whenever he travelled outside the cities?

Or, for a nearer parallel, the meeting of Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France in 1520, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Henry still held Calais on the French side of the Channel, so he and Francis shared a land border.

The Field was a shallow valley between the last English town (Guisnes) and the last French town (Ardres). The whole area was prepared and decorated at stupendous expense, down to landscaping so that each king’s pavilion would be at an equal elevation. The local housing stock would not accommodate the armies of nobles, soldiers, officials, servants and camp followers. So the plain was dotted with thousands of tents, some very grand indeed — so grand that all that expensive “cloth of gold” gave the place its name.

For Henry a temporary palace was erected. Here is how the contemporary Englishman, and possibly eyewitness, Edward Hall describes it in his entertaining and detailed Chronicle. It was, Hall writes, “the most noble and royall lodgyng before seen, for it was a palays”. The palace was actually an immense square tent, 328 feet on each side and over 30 feet tall. The canvas sides were painted to resemble stone, the canvas roof to mimic slate.

Inside, Hall recounts scrupulously, were “all houses of offices that to such an honourable court should apperteigne, that is to wete, the lorde Chamberlain, lorde Steward, lorde Thresourer of the household, for the comptroller and office of grene cloth, wardroppes, juell house, and office of houshold service, as ewery, pantrie, seller [cellar], buttery, spicery, pitcher house, larder, and poultrie, and all other offices so large and faire that the officers might and did marueieles [marvel]…”

Not much has changed! The Grand Presidential Floor has its own security control room, microbiological food testing lab, round-the-clock room service — more or less everything a modern court needs.

Hall’s Chronicle tells the reader a lot of things. Among the facts, he lists precisely who was entitled to attend what event, what the exact order of precedence was, how the events were set up and what they cost.

Two things Hall does not say. One, anything about the delightful story that Francis bested Henry in a quick bout of wrestling. Two, that the summit had no lasting effect. The friendliness evaporated very quickly, and two years later England and France were at war — again.

Moral of the story: from imperial summitry, expect only modest progress.

*Various figures have been reported. This is not the highest.

On the day of the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony, chief minister Sheila Dikshit gave a TV interview in which she managed to appear at once smug and humble. She tut-tutted gently about the mess in the run-up to the Games, when preparations were not directly in her hands, and, because she was far wilier than the interviewer, was allowed to dwell upon what she described as her government’s success at cleaning things up at the last minute. Then she neatly turned the tables on the interviewer by tut-tutting sorrowfully about how self-indulgent and childish the media had been in focusing only on Games disasters while there was such sterling evidence of success: the Yamuna flood relief measures that had been organised at such short notice and on such a large scale. And so on. Plainly you have to get up early to catch this CM on the wrong foot.

One of the more interesting, though perhaps predictable things Dikshit said was in response to a question or two on the apparent banishment of beggars from the streets of central Delhi. Is that democratic and fair, she was asked. No such thing happened, the CM replied, adding contradictorily that anyway several homeless shelters had been put up, and after all, she said sweetly, “If you have guests coming over on Diwali then wouldn’t you want your home to look beautiful?” (Her exact words: “We are not trying to hide but you know that you are receiving guests. Yes, Delhi has been decorated — for Commonwealth Games, for celebration… lot of things are there. Don’t you have the right to light up your house on Diwali or whatever festival you may celebrate and are you trying to hide your poverty at that point of time?”)

I found this interesting for all sorts of reasons. First, clearly it is true. Yes, with guests on their way, I would like my home to do me credit. Second, it is brazen. It amounts to saying that beggars and urban blight amount to the same thing and are unlovely and for that reason it is OK to hide them away when someone calls. Third, these clearly aren’t your neighbourhood friends visiting. You are not on equal terms with these guests; you hope they will go away impressed.

This is still somewhat OK. One is used to this. The thing is that, beggars (and that’s a catch-all term for all sorts of “undesirables”) aside, the beautification of Delhi has been a curiously brain-dead procedure. In the last several months pavements have been redone in smooth stone not concrete slabs, nicely turned bollards planted to keep automobiles off pavements, kerbs brightly repainted and re-repainted, roads relaid and widened, new streetlamps installed on new poles, walls given fresh coats, new street signage set up, new grass laid down…

So it isn’t a new Delhi that’s come out of all this. (I’m not counting the Metro and airport, because they are not just for the Games.) It’s just a neater version of the old Delhi. And, in the nature of Indian things, it is extremely unlikely to last.

This seems like a great loss, because how often does our government show itself willing and energetic enough to revamp a whole megacity? Could we not have done something a little more interesting than apply spit and polish? Delhiites are not noted for their civic behaviour, so no meaningful change would have been easy to accomplish. But this was a good opportunity to try.

Here are a few things I can think of that we might have tried. Restrain your disbelief as you look through them. Eventually they will have to be done, or else our city will become unlivable, unviable in the long term.

1. Greenbelts. We could have revived the Ridge by freezing any further encroachment and turfing out the greedy armed forces. We could have planted belts of sturdy trees around the city, especially toward the west and southwest, to help keep out the desert sand and dust.

2. We could have done more to clean up the Yamuna. We didn’t, and yet the Games Village sits on the Yamuna bed, looking out at ugly road bridges and power plants. That’s ingratitude.

3. Only the top few most-visited historical monuments have got the loving treatment. How about the dozens of important ones, and the hundreds of minor but beautiful ones? Instead another huge chunk of Siri has been scraped clean of trees and sports facilities built on top (see the ruination on Wikimapia). This is appallingly stupid and short-term behaviour.

4. Urban farming. Instead of buying ill-treated vegetables from the Yamuna bed and nearby districts, at least some urban demand could be met by urban farming. You might not think it, but Delhi does have plenty of spare land in state and private hands. Tell us how, give incentives, make neighbourhood sales and supply possible.

5. Instead of an isolated luxury “village” for delegates which will later belong to affluent Delhi investors, how about something along the lines of DDA projects for middle-class housing? Here was a chance to get DDA to build to high standards and innovate once again for a better balance between private and communal living (private developers have lost the plot on that).

6. Making Delhi more walkable. It’s not just pavements that are needed. That too, but also something to give them life. A mix of streetside activities, places to sit. Most important, perhaps, covered walks to keep the sun off walkers — ancient Roman and even some Indian cities did this with long, shady, useful arcades along streets. It could be done in many parts of Delhi.

7. Showcasing slums instead of banishing them. The world knows about India’s urban slums, yet, foolishly and pointlessly, we keep trying to hide them. That’s a lost opportunity. Of course, being comfortable with our slums would involve actually allowing them to exist. The middle and upper classes have always needed a pool of servants near at hand. So, try whatever works: providing water and sewerage, legal electricity, small loans, applying basic building standards, ID cards, local council…

8. Really doing something about parking. This argument that says less parking = less cars on the road = more people in public transport is not in tune with Indian reality. Have better, ample, paid parking. Change the rate regime, for sure, but give people space to put their cars. Eventually we might all use electric cars, but personal transport is here to stay.

There are lots more. The irony is that such a programme of renewal, and the colossal publicity it would have gathered, might actually have brought us the tide of tourists the Commonwealth Games have not. And we would have been more confident, possibly happier, and probably better off — immediately as well as in the long term.

(The original version on the Business Standard official blog got some interesting/angry responses.)