Bringing the Rainbow; The Hindware Story by RK Somany

Once, while driving along a rutted mud road to Bahadurgarh in a bouncing old Morris Minor, RK Somany saw a rainbow suddenly appear. The heat, the dust and the fretful uncertainty of getting land for his plant was forgotten, and ‘a chore became exciting. Ever since, the rainbow became my guiding mantra. In whatever I do, as a businessperson, a father, a husband, a friend and a family man, I ask myself: ‘Am I bringing the rainbow to this? The passion, the excitement, the colour?’

No wonder then that RK Somany titled his autobiography ‘Bringing the Rainbow; The Hindware Story’. And no doubt he tried to bring the rainbow into this book too. The story is about how Hindware went from a newbie to a market leader, surpassing the country’s economic handicaps, everyday business challenges and even personal impediments from within the Somany family. 

Autobiographies create a glorious canvas of context – historical, political and cultural. The story of a person comes riddled with important events from which he, and thus the reader, draws valuable lessons. They provide us with a deeper understanding of the subject they are written around. And they make for interesting literary reading in that the reader looks for omissions in the narration and hesitant gaps in the narratorial voice; those moments which make you wonder – is this his recollection as an adult or an uncoloured version from his childhood? 

The telling of the tale. The home and the world.

RK Somany tells the story as if it is being meticulously recalled for a live audience. So while sometimes the narration is linear at others he shifts between the past and the present. While he does that, a panoramic picture of not just his life’s events but those happenings which beset the times also gets painted. What comes through is a visual of both how the businesses were run and how families were too. 

RK Somany was the ninth among eleven children, brought up by his eldest brother, Hiralall, after his father’s death when he was seven. Those were times of ‘centrality of morals’ and when older brothers were near-bosses, who set standards and conditions! But who also patrolled the house with a rifle during crises like the Great Calcutta Killings. Good words carried worth, good families even more. School admissions and membership of Exchanges and Clubs happened based on reputation. And yet, under the same strong family umbrella came a scheming sibling, two mysterious deaths and some more “bad blood”. 

Business was never usual in times of historical flux and ‘life wasn’t all glamour and fun.’ Red tape, black markets, ‘blinkered government policies’ and socialism made private industry seem suspicious. There was very little market intelligence and data to base decisions on. Add to that infrastructural woes like power cuts and ‘inspector raj’ in a place like UP, and later the Emergency with the ‘draconian MISA used to intimidate businessmen’ and the financial crisis of 1991. Hindware had many tides to overcome, and ‘Bringing the Rainbow’ shows how RK Somany did just that.  

As one reads what comes across as a ‘business saga’, one notices significant events, professional and personal, which made Hindware a household name. And which made RK Somany the man who is speaking to us through this book. 

Important events for him. Lessons for all.

‘In retrospect, I am really grateful to my family for its decision to move me out of Calcutta more than half a century ago. I wouldn’t have become who I am had I remained there.’

In ‘Bringing the Rainbow’, as with all autobiographies, we sense a bildungsroman. From boyhood to his businessmen years, the book clearly chronicles RK Somany’s growth. But if you pay attention to the teller, the tale makes you privy to pivotal points of time in his life which stand out as peaks. His early days reveal how the psychology of this second youngest sibling evolved, as a ‘fierce determination’ was born over fighting for a mere chance to play. Private tutors would teach his siblings and he would sit around, listening.  Learning. A ‘template for my behavioral responses to adversity’ was created as violent and economically stressed historical eras unfolded. In him also developed a streak of individuality away from his brothers’ footsteps - to become a graduate even as he helped his family in business! 

It was the physically taxing days spent in England which helped him learn the ropes of the ceramic industry. The discomfort and ‘enforced thrift’ of those times led to a success which comes when one is ‘in the thick of action’.  The aim always remained to provide world class products at Indian consumer prices, and not compromise on customer goodwill because of the more profitable black-marketing. Trysts with Jaycees and the Rotary Club brought out the public leader in him. Exposure to the differences between workers in England and India made him understand and deal with labour strikes too. 

An eye-opening event was that of buying back his own brand at a high price from a Chinese company, which was using it. Hindware’s wings had spread and problems were fast increasing. ‘The big boys of the global sanitaryware industry soon entered the Indian market.’ Often, the obstacles were political, like he found out when the sales tax department of Govt of Haryana raided his plant. Countless such important events in his life left him learning and unlearning, and leave us doing the same too.

‘I am humble enough to know that I do not have all the answers. The HSIL board comprises men of rare distinctions. It would be foolish not to leverage and take advantage of their combined wisdom. This is simple common sense…’    

The voice.  The person.  

‘I wasn’t certain that the familial ties and the strict Marwari culture that had kept us brothers closely bonded would endure into the third generation…maybe the time had come to divide…’

The straightforwardness with which the story is told makes RK Somany seem a friend by the time we finish reading. And we his confidants! No, there are no sensational revelations eager to please the reader. But there are many moments where the already-thin guard of autobiographies is down, and where the narrator truly shows himself in flesh and blood. 

You sense relief when he says his family was ‘without any choking orthodoxy’, and gratitude and admiration for his brother when he says ‘it takes a rare human being to put his own education and possible future on the line to bring up his siblings.’ There is honest admittance of being well-off from the time he was conscious to the time he first signed a cheque for one crore of rupees. No mincing that, because ‘in the tradition of all the great Marwari businessmen I admire, I believe cash is king.’ No mincing either the candid revelations of ‘strains (that) had begun to surface in this united and happy family image we portrayed to the outside world.’ Forgiveness shows when he speaks about his estranged brother Chandra Kumar. ‘I’m sure he has his reasons’ is what Somany leaves it at. 

‘To find smuggled products in a government-owned facility in the Pakistan capital was both a cause for shock and delight’, he admits. Regret is visible when he notices that ‘the quality of trade and the people involved in it has deteriorated’ and anger when he says ‘what really gets my goat is the unrestricted import of cheap Chinese sanitaryware.’ 

There are gaps in the narration too. Hesitance. A mechanical telling not suiting the events. Spaces where there’s less revealed and much concealed and absence of it is conspicuous. For instance, while we know meticulous details of how the business progressed, we barely know anything about the wives, how they felt about his ‘huge personal sacrifices’ of mostly working through the days, or their mysterious deaths. Did he try finding out what happened? Why aren’t we told? Is it because it has no direct bearing on the Hindware story? Is that the reason why his children also occupy a marginal place in this account? What I also missed reading about were the trusted hands like managers  and workers and clerks and guards who probably were an important part of this journey but who have not found space in the book.     

Interesting business talk.

‘Being the youngest of the four surviving brothers, my claims were often overridden by the others in favour of their own plans for the companies they ran. It may surprise many readers but this is the way Indian business families operate.’

There’s much that readers will learn about businesses in general and sanitaryware manufacturing, designing and trade in particular from ‘Bringing the Rainbow’. How, first, the idea of sanitaryware needed to be introduced to Indian consumers. How vitreous china which ‘didn’t absorb water even if the product was chipped’ could be marketed. How when competition heated up superior technologies and designs had to be introduced. Why HSIL wasn’t comfortable in giving dealers sole selling agencies, while also visiting dealers of rivals to understand ‘market trends’.  Why a close watch had to be kept on allied sectors. And ‘the one clause that has remained unchanged for 52 years is the one on not allowing dealers to charge more than the MRP – a clause we introduced decades before it became mandatory.’

The book also contains nuggets of information on hunter and sportsmen rifles, the structure of ammunition strong rooms, motors of submersible pumps and goes into angry details of some ‘bizarre laws’! 

The book ends in the present, where RK Somany sits talking to us, confessing that ‘I try to teach myself something new every few days.’

His rise, in many ways, signifies India’s post-Independence industrialization drive. ‘Goodwill takes decades to build’ and this book is a glimpse into how it can be. HSIL’s rise, made possible with ‘close supervision, constant innovation, investment in the best technology and strong systems’ is also the journey of a man whose goal ‘was, and remains, to stay ahead of the curve’. This man intends to retire when ‘God retires me.’ But for now ‘I intend to lead HSIL into some new areas.’ 

A good book for those interested in the Indian business history as well as those who love a good story well told! 

'Bringing the Rainbow' by RK Somany is a Maven Rupa Publication, 2016

[Review was commissioned by the PR Agency. Views are my own.]

Mind; The Final Frontier by Ravi Singh

‘What does it all mean? What is going on in the world? Is a human being merely an advanced and complex robot, which processes information and doesn’t have free will, and choice is merely an illusion? It doesn’t make any sense. But why does it have to make any sense?’ 

Once upon a time, we said ‘to my mind’ before we expressed our opinions. Acronyms like IMHO (In my humble opinion) or TBH (To be honest) were yet to be invented. Probably, we owned our minds much more back then, what with borrowed opinions flying amok now. We invoked the thinking-space before we expressed it. My mind, where my thoughts came from. Which in a way defined us. 

So, when I asked myself what came to my mind immediately when I said the word ‘mind’, the social media addict in me took no time to say ‘Hey! Facebook’s persistent question What’s on your mind? In the status window.’ Which was usually answered with a picture of my dinner or my pet! Thankfully, I got to read Ravi Singh’s ‘Mind: The Final Frontier’ to make me think beyond the visible. To make me disassociate from the given and delve deeper into the unseen… less facile bits of what I call my mind.

In the Acknowledgement section of the book the author confesses that he is prone to ‘weird’ ideas in his mind, about the mind. In it he isn’t alone, for thousands have before him and many more will in the future too try to ‘decode the human mind’. The mother of all answers is curiosity and the human mind is not just the confirmed seat but also the most popular subject of it. Ravi believes ‘answers don’t lie outside but within us. For that, we must understand how the mind works.’ With a beautiful request for open-mindedness, Ravi asks us to ‘… dispel any preconceived notions about the mind, and agree that we do not know what the ‘mind’ is. That should be a good starting point.’ And then ‘see what follows.’

The book is divided into three main parts – Part I: Decoding the Anatomy of the Human Mind, Part II: The Universe, God, Love and Morality, Part III: Authentic Life. Each part is further comprised of short and succinct chapters dealing with specific ideas. One look at the chapter names and you know a wide-angle lens has been used for this deconstruction, something that is confirmed once you’ve read the book. Various mental states have been evaluated, as have been over-arching concepts like logic, faith, guilt and even god.  

The basic premise used to unravel the mind was unique for me. Ravi tries to make us see the mind as a computer which processes information. He uses this approach to simplify ideas like self and consciousness while also discussing problems like fear, anxiety and even boredom! 

The Information Processing Approach (IPA) assumes that individuals are, well, information processors. So, an individual receives input information either from his external environment or from internal memory through an interface (say, ears). This input information is processed by a specific processor to produce a change in the individual. This change (physical, chemical, etc), then acts as input information for another processor and so on. For instance, if you like a song the change produced by the processor would cause a sensation of pleasure. As for what a processor is in terms of the human body? While in computers it is a set of instructions, Ravi calls it a ‘mental construct’ and an ‘abstract entity’ here. He divides them into low-level (primitive habit) and high-level (thought-level) processors. Low-level processors include language and pain-pleasure, among others, whereas high-level ones help us analyze, chart-out and choose. 

While I understood the definition of his IPA till this point, a huge part of me doubted if this seemingly simplistic approach could make me see my mind in a new light. And IMHO, it did rather interestingly! 

For instance, how can ‘self’ or ‘I’ be explained using the IPA? Ravi will derive that the notion of self is non-permanent! The mind, with its competing processors and multiple outputs makes the ‘state of mind’ give a cumulative sensation of ‘I’ in a particular context and time. Thus ‘self’ represents reality, rather than being reality itself. So you’re right when you ask ‘Who am I?’ And you’re right if you wonder, if there is no one ‘I’ then whose free will am I talking about?  

This then connects with his idea of consciousness. He infers that it is ‘based on the level of consciousness (that) we have the conception of ‘I’. And further, if the 'window of consciousness’ expands, external time stands still, as we feel 'completely absorbed in the present.’ This state of being devoid of any expectations is a sustainable happiness. Because, ‘fulfilment of high expectations actually makes it difficult to sustain happiness.’ See how one idea connects to the other? 

Ravi Singh’s explanation of ignorance through IPA is about understanding how ‘there is a difference between knowing something at the thought level, and knowing something at the level of lower processors, or the experiential level’. How falsehoods may become truth statements ‘if over a period of time one processor keeps winning over another’. 

Something about decoding psychological fear stuck to me. As a product of a self which by default tries to avoid pain and experience pleasure, here’s what he says about fear: ‘Next time when you experience a fearful thought, try to observe that thought closely. You will see that that very thought is the thinker itself (of that thought). There is no separate self that experiences that thought, rather, it is the thought that experiences itself…and fear will dissolve.’ 

Ravi also argues how logic and emotion are not contrary to each other and with the help of a simple semi-mathematical equation infers that ‘for the doer every action is logical. For the perceiver it may seem logical or emotional based on their own calculation.’ The same equation is used in the analysis and understanding of guilt and faith, till he involves you to a point where you too question in one voice – then is logic itself based on faith? 

To my mind, the chapter called ‘Nature of the Universe; Press Start to Begin’ stands out in the book. It begins thus - ‘Everything in the universe including inanimate things can be governed by information processing.’ You have to suspend all disbelief before you move on; on to more questions. If the universe is a closed system then how did information first enter it? The Big Bang? In a closed system, based on the four dimensions, there cannot be a truly random event. And so ‘if there is even one truly random event in the universe, it indicates that some information from outside the system has leaked into it.’ Between saying it and implying it, Ravi Singh draws us into his idea of evolution, a Matrix World, free will, love and even god. 

I do wish the book ended with this big bang, though. The last three chapters on relationships, job satisfaction and meditation techniques just seem to fade in comparison to what preceded them. Perhaps, they lack the novelty which most of the other chapters shine bright with. The list for references for meditative techniques at the end of the last chapter has one sole reference, and oddly seems incomplete, as if a page went missing. What may also seem missing for some readers who enjoy flourishes and flair even in the most logical and scientific narrations is a certain style – one which uses examples and creative props to drive home the point. Or even humour for that matter! Because, while Ravi Singh’s book hooks you with what it is saying, it may not with how it says it. There are no fancy detours. Examples are repeated in order to explain different concepts. There’s stream-lined focus and purposeful, no-nonsense writing. Almost, as if it is an abridged guide to a larger, more voluminous research.  

Be that as it may, by the time you finish reading ‘Mind: The Final Frontier’, you feel glad to have done that. Ravi Singh gives no grand theories. He makes you see, co-derive and be amazed at how IPA can be used to re-examine ideas which you long thought self-evident. How human minds and machines may not be as far apart as one imagines. This book, the size of an “impulse-buy” in a book shop, belies its conciseness as it begins a large thought-storm, where questions are answered only to give rise to more and more questions. After all, ‘it is preferable to stay in uncertainty than to settle for a truth which one is not convinced of,’ believes Ravi Singh.

A good read for those who like their thought-level processors provoked. Read and then 'see what follows.'

'Mind; The Final Frontier' by Ravi Singh is a Partridge publication, 2016

[Review was commissioned by the author. Views are my own.] 

C for Chuckle in D for ‘Dating, Diapers and Denial’ by Rachna Singh

In a big, bad globe spinning around the mundane, both the home and the world often feel like the weight which shrugged Atlas, and not just on Mondays. (Sigh) Then comes along a book like a cylinder of fresh laughing gas. Rachna Singh’s ‘Dating, Diapers and Denial’ is that. It left me giggling like a 4-year-old (even though I am 16 now!)

The book is a mock-self-help, with 15 lessons which Rachna learnt or which she wants us to give serious thought to on a good-humored day. It is about men, women and children, but mostly about them together in one tea cup, stirred while juggling their roles and messing Rachna’s seldom-combed hair. 

Her imagination is wild, but this is clearly her real life and so candidly shown you would wonder if your family would cook you if you threw open your house’s back door for a ‘comical view of life from a woman’s perspective’. She has done exactly that, in an organized and fair manner. Organised because the chapters (Lessons) follow a neat chronology of homely phases of evolution – dating to diapers to denial (about age, you know). And fair, because she’s not lampooning just men but boys all ages! 

On men and marriage

For some of us marriage happens. As suddenly there are men growing out of our couches. The husband variety is a particularly interesting species. Lesson 1 itself tells you that ‘You will learn that real men really forget’, but when women dig mushy memories they ‘insist that the recall and recall alone is evidence of true love’. Why shouldn’t they? Men, however, with an ‘inner mind … operated via a TV remote’ never meet our memorable expectations!  

All roles that men have to play are important. But none as much as the one ‘to record your performance on the video camera’ during the society celebrations for Independence Day or selection for Teej Queen. Successfully? Not in this book, no.  

But men are human too, even though one may believe they’re half-man half-remotes. They age just like any normal human and go into denial. What do they do, apart from getting ‘multiple gym memberships’? They buy, like Rachna says, motorbikes, which:

‘they park in the garage, or … under a tree. They clean these bikes, talk to them, and pretend to repair them with expensive tool-kits. Of course, they don’t ride the bikes because a) the wife has made it clear that the roads are not safe. b) the doctor has told him that his back cannot be subjected to this extreme stress. The spare parts are expensive too, so these men try to sell their kidneys for them. But by now, the only place accepting their kidney is the National Institute of Fossil Sciences.’ 

When age sets in for a woman (obviously much later than men!) and she has found her voice, the man at home mutates into 'a casual observer (who) has just woken up and turned up the volume of the cricket match and is, at best, vaguely aware, that there is some blurred silhouette of a mid-to-large-sized female in the corner of his eye. It seems to be saying something.’ No surprise then that our maids and support staff not just help us but ‘are used as role-models during spousal fights’.

We can't blame women. Do you know what we go through to bear kids?!

On childbirth and parenting

And here’s an excerpt:

‘Childbirth was not easy! In fact, our first-born, Aisha, was born in extremely alien conditions: at a hospital in Kawasaki in Japan. The only English term those guys knew back then was ‘curry and chutney’ used while ordering ‘curry and chutney’ at any Indian or Pakistani restaurant. And, the only Japanese word we knew was ‘Sayonara’ taught to us by Asha Parekh. Combining the two, one could not do much except have dinner and part: both activities not quite directly relevant to childbirth.

The Japanese government was very kind to us and provided us with the services of an interpreter. We were grateful till we read the fine print: we had to pay her by the hour. The thought of it gave both of us severe uterine contractions. In both cases, it turned out to be a false alarm, since I never went into labour, and Alok discovered he didn’t have a uterus.

Since I did not go into labour, and it was seven days over the due date, they finally decided to operate. It was a unique c-section operation conducted with the help of placards to communicate:

‘NOW IT IS PRICK’

‘NOW YOU IS OUCH’

I must have laughed a lot through the procedure, perhaps giving them an inaccurate cross-cultural lesson: ‘Indians laugh a lot during childbirth’. Maybe, it’s part of the curriculum of the Tokyo University for International Relations now.'

Rachna has a wide array of experiences to share as a parent, and lessons learnt too. Say, how new age parents cannot rely on threats of ‘Budhdha baba’ anymore. Kids know there is no old man out to get them, ‘and the old man you point to is Ram Jethmalani, in conversation with Arnab Goswami. And he is not out to get them. At this age, there are few things he ‘gets’.

So, with kids you need to be ready. With new-age treats, with threats, with non-organic vacations and with answers especially for the ‘acid test’ questions, which feature God. Rachna helps.

Through anecdotes from her own childhood to what our kids consider their childhood, Rachna manages to paint two generations in two different contexts (with Bobby, the male doll in moulded plastic band-master’s dress … ‘who had socks that just grew on him of the same material as his legs were’ making a guest appearance and marrying many female dolls!)

On women, and everything about them!

A lot of feminine ground is covered in ‘Dating, Diapers and Denial’. That is, the various issues which beset women at myriad stages of their lives. From keenly observing ‘increased political activity in a group of girls’ during playtime to later in uncannily similar kitty parties, Rachna gives us a peep into social behavior that we see when more than one women are put together in a tea cup, or in a gym. She even shows us the hilarity of being a work-from-home mother.

She loves meeting old people, ‘but if I peel the layers, it’s really about being addressed as “you youngsters” by them’. She stands at that ‘awkward age. Older cousins are becoming grandparents; younger ones are still getting married.’ 

‘I feel it’s time to start a movement for equal, non-discriminatory facilities at discos. I ask, why are there no wheel chairs at Tito’s? Why can’t they have ‘Geriatric Nites’ as well?’

I agree!

India, and abroad

India as we know it emerges; as a land where ‘according to the Book of Indian Politics, if you can walk around and breathe, unassisted, you are young.’ Where a doctor’s entourage 'comprises doctors, nurses and some MNS volunteers, who are on a project to uphold Indian values in wards.’ And where prime time can be rather confusing, thus:

‘During the news telecast the TV screen is sliced into several disconnected sections … For instance, Mayawati behenji wagging a finger and making a stern point is not to be linked to the scrolling line below: ‘Breaking News: Salman Khan decides to marry his dream woman’. And certainly not to the animated ad ‘I-pill set them free.’

Lesson 8 insists that ‘You will want to come back to India’, especially if you are in Japan where there are too many words to denote ‘apology’ from ‘I am sorry’ to ‘I-am-appalled-at-having-offended-you-can-I-bear-your-child-as-an-apology’? NRIs don’t escape her wit. ‘Irrespective of which country we were in, our lives seemed to be under a cloud. On closer inspection, it was found that the cloud was a mass of soap bubbles, under which we washed dishes, day after miserable day!’

Now if only she had elucidated on the gifts NRIs get for their “poorer cousins” in the third world, I would have stood up on my chair and applauded. 

So, what did I learn? 

That for my forgetful husband I will do as Rachna advises; create events: ‘Remember you promised on our anniversary I could buy that bracelet if I stuck to my diet plan? The combined effect of ‘remember’ and ‘anniversary’ will get you more than the bracelet.’

That out of the ‘two options, one is to find a good parent role model whom you can emulate or a bad parent contrast against whom you can look very good’, I pick the latter. 

That I swear to free women-folk from oppression. ‘And what better way to do it than to mete out the same treatment to the men, giving them a taste of their own medicine?’

That other people’s husbands too have a super colour palette of ‘stone grey t-shirt and stone grey shorts, embellished fashionably with a stone grey belt and stone grey party sandals.’ (On this note, I forgive him!)

And, that if writing humour is tough work, reviewing it is even more. This here has lengthened like a rubber-band and I haven't told you half of it yet …

‘Dating, Diapers and Denial’ is Rachna’s “autobiography” but you realize it is a one-size-fits-all stand-up comedy act about our everyday lives. We women will relate to the anecdotes and enjoy, and men are requested to have a good sense of humour. The humour is warm not dry, and with witticisms delivered with a straight-face and right when you are not expecting them. 

This was a fun and funny read.  

'Dating, Diapers and Denial' by Rachna Singh is published by Alchemy Publishers, 2011.

[Review was commissioned by the author. Views are my own.]

‘Half a Billion Rising’ says Anirudha Dutta

Twenty per cent of the world’s young women live in India and changes in their lives, both socially and economically, are thus of import to the world at large. Yet, we continue a nation of many paradoxes. Anirudha Dutta, before he conceptualized the book ‘Half a Billion Rising; The Emergence of the Indian Woman’, knew that. He also knew that ‘Society it seems is horribly schizophrenic with double standards and this is not a recent development.’

But Anirudha was intrigued, because through global statistics and empirical data, first-hand interviews and ensuing inferences, he was sensing a change. Collecting within the folds of his study examples from the underprivileged to the affluent, Anirudha decided to ‘chronicle the changes, the change drivers and their implications’ for the position of women in India. He wrote this book to make us travel into the lanes of Forbesgunge, Munger, Dimapur, Bhavnagar, Nashik and even cosmopolitan Mumbai and New Delhi, in order to make us meet those girls across strata of society who are collectively a part of this mini-revolution. What also comes through is how different generations are experiencing changing times – first-hand or through their daughters boldly deciding ‘Hum dukaan ja rahey hein’ or aspiring ‘Sirf Harvard hi Jana Hai.’ 

His aim was one - to understand ‘were women feeling more empowered?’ He answers in bold letters, YES. This gives the book its intent and the underlying note of promise, because while ‘numbers never tell the full story’ people’s voices do. The rise of woman power in India is a work in progress. And ‘Half a Billion Rising’ attempts to show that it is indeed ‘in progress.’

‘See how much of this change and churn is all-pervasive’ – Visibly positive trends

According to Anirudha Dutta the best places to observe how much things are changing – within women and around them - are small towns.

Once a woman in Himachal angrily shooed a camera-wielding him away, but now girls in villages are un-selfconsciously posing for snaps, with many in jeans! ‘They are breaching the mores and boundaries of femininity’, in the most conservative of environments. We are now meeting fathers, like Muskan’s, who will sacrifice anything to educate daughters because ‘Hum Tughlaqi nahin hain’; or husbands like Mehul, who is going to marry not just a woman outside his caste but one who is more educated than him too! 

Reluctance to send girls to study in centres run by NGOs is fast vanishing, and private school enrollment in rural India is also increasing. Supriya from 'Vidya and Child' in Noida confirms how almost half the students in their centre are girls. Clearly, schooling is no longer a boys-only privilege. 

You will meet Daksha, daughter of a chowkidar, who tells us how her ‘life has changed so much that even when I come back very late, anyone can drop me back and my father doesn’t say anything.’ Candid conversations reveal how most of them will insist on working after marriage, and end marriages if they go sour. They are unchaining not just themselves from prejudice but promising to rear their daughters ‘without any shades of being a prisoner of circumstances.’ Deepika, ‘a modern peripatetic Indian’ working in Bengaluru avows ‘I will give her freedom. I will be a friend to her’. This idea of equality translates into another socially important one. Says Priya, a product of NGO Kumari Vikash Prakalp,

‘I get a scholarship because of my caste. This I think is not fair. In my college I have a friend, she deserves a scholarship because of her financial condition. But … she is from the open category.’

Significant odds are being fought and level playing fields sought. Whole communities are feeling the impact. Girls are picking their battles and are ‘mindful that anything she does should not be used as an argument in favour of not educating girls.’ They are expressing, declaring and discussing their desires, and that their numbers – in schools and colleges, workplaces and media – are increasing is helping with the confidence.

Talking about media, notice how condom brands are targeting women as consumers seeking pleasure, and not just birth control? Sanitary napkin companies are asking us to ‘live life’ and gradually is noticeable the ‘emergence of a new kind of woman’ in the movies. I like how Anirudha says ‘the strict silos of good and bad are no longer applicable’ except in Ekta Kapoor’s soaps, which seem bent to feed those diametrically opposed to the liberated, thinking woman’s choices.

And who or what are the change drivers?

The book features many!

Aspirations, in girls who want to succeed despite their circumstances. They are looking ahead with a new-found desire to ‘make it’. Mothers, themselves illiterate and sufferers of patriarchy, are putting a high premium on their daughter’s freedom, supporting them. They realize if the lives of their daughters are going to be any different from their own, it will be because of education, economic independence and the resultant empowerment. Thus, they are becoming the right role models! 

But mothers belong to castes and communities. What role does an over-powering society play on liberally inclined minds? Saira, daughter of an auto driver, reveals – ‘I get worried by women sitting in a circle and gossiping. It scares me because I don’t want to end up like that.’ Parents are looking beyond honouring family councils and communal ideas. Nuclearization of families is helping women question traditional social norms. 

Who would have thought. but urbanization, in many ways, is acting the great equalizer. Proximity to urbanized localities is giving girls the opportunity to go to neighborhood centres of learning, for one. This in turn is making them find role models in the form of teachers and NGO karyakartas who are intervening with their parents to promote education and open-mindedness. Interestingly, education has a direct impact on marriages. The ‘law of unintended consequences’ is at work when the girl is educated, because it simply means less dowry!

Ambedkar believed villages are cesspools of communalism, casteism, gender injustice and the resultant cruelty. Agrees Anirudha in his book – ‘India lives in its villages but it doesn’t need to continue living there with all the ills as well as deleterious social practices.’ Manisha, a working woman in Delhi, knows – ‘Maybe the spark of rebellion was inside me (in Allahabad) but the release the canvas and the ground for it was provided by the city.’ Shafiq, an auto-driver from Mumbai, is very happy in the city too. Why? Because availability of good quality condoms ensures he has fewer kids and thus he affords his daughter’s education. Amusing, yet so telling!

Infrastructure development in villages, like good roads, is leading to diversified income options. Vidya, from Nanded, a mere 300 km from Hyderabad, did the unimaginable and went to search for a job in that city, alone. Would it have been possible without connectivity? Mobile phones and the internet need to be thanked too 

And NGOs building ‘a trust quotient within their ecosystem that is of paramount importance,’ prodding the government to be more responsible.

And what role are men playing? An area of concern.

Questions abound. Is it true that violence against women is increasing because men see their turfs being encroached upon and rather have the women under-educated and disempowered? The power dynamics of gender roles find prominent space in ‘Half a Billion Rising’, because if we look around we realize how ‘the bar of what is acceptable keeps getting lowered.’ While Muskan’s father, Mehul and Shafiq (mentioned above) represent the changing face of patriarchy, there are many more who want to maintain status quo. 

Imagine this! A High Court lawyer in Mumbai has reached the conclusion that ‘girls should not be educated. Why? Because today after getting educated girls are coming to the court and asking for a share of paternal property, and divorce.’ Education cannot dent upbringing in some cases, the book will show you. Neither do positions of power, as is evident by statements our ministers regularly make against women’s clothes and habits. Says Farzana, a middle-aged portly lady, for her community – ‘Muslims need a jihad for education. And then another jihad to make sure that the girls start working and stay working.’

In domestic urban settings, the number of stay-at-home-dads is minuscule and attrition of women in work forces remarkably high post kids. The idea of role-reversal frightens men! Tanvi, in her plush flat, tells us how ‘my mother thought that even if my brother did not study much it would be fine since we had a lot of property.’ What was Tanvi told by her father? ‘Do well in studies and we will let you study further. We will give you a certain time frame, otherwise we will get you married off early.’ Tanvi found her drive! 

Ours is a ‘country where the exact opposite of any statement is often true’. Anirudha balances his narrative to portray the flip side of the success graph. Statistics reveal how affluent families, thanks to resources, are secretly indulging in female foeticide. The most educated are differentiating between boys and girls. And dowry has only found different names. This brings the discussion back to mindsets, and if they are changing. Over a few pages at this juncture, the author re-examines his whole study in the light of questions - Is education really liberating? Is economic success a step towards gender equality? Or is it universally true that:

‘Lack of money is not the main barrier to adoption (of new ideas), people’s attitudes are.’

However, Anirudha is confident that there is reason to celebrate. The pace of change is accelerating and he has collected first-hand evidence of it to bring it to us. This happy note dominates the book. Why not!

The present continuous tense of the ‘Rising’ women

‘The more I travelled and the more I interviewed girls across the country, the more convinced I was that a monumental change is underway. The change did not start yesterday and it will not end tomorrow.’

Half a billion of us are rising, even as we speak. Stories of courage and progressive rebellion form the soul of this book. Anirudha wonders ‘what at the end of the day is the impact of one small revolution inside one household? Does it change the lives of other girls?’ More importantly, are boys and men changing fast enough to handle the ‘new age Indian woman’? These questions invite us to think. 

‘As I transcribed the interviews and thought through my conversations, it was very evident that in the coming decade we will see greater participation of women in the labour force, we will see a more educated work force especially amongst women and these will have far-reaching socio-economic implications … Boys and men will have to respect the changes, accept the changes and adapt to live with the changes. It will be a new normal and will leave many maladjusted and bewildered.’

‘Half a Billion Rising’ is a book which shows a new Indian woman emerging from centuries of patriarchy, whether in tiny lanes or as CEOs of multinational companies. It is time that change is acknowledged and Anirudha Dutta does well to keenly observe, study, understand and document it in this inspiring narrative. 

A good read for women, and an important one for men.  

'Half a Billion Rising' by Anirudha Dutta is published by Rainlight, Rupa Publications,2015 

[This review was commissioned by the publisher. Views are my own.]

Book Review – The First Firangis by Jonathan Gil Harris

I just finished reading ‘The First Firangis’ by Jonathan Gil Harris. 

This book does many things. Many.  

At the surface, ‘The First Firangis’ tells remarkable stories of heroes, healers, charlatans, courtesans, pirates and other shadowy foreigners from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who reached Indian shores centuries before the British Raj, with humbler ambitions and to finally leave ‘their bones in the subcontinent’. In spectacular vividness, the book brings those lesser-known firangis to life. I could see them, in royal robes or bare nakedness, in harems or in hiding, in ships or lying buried. I could see them bending over paintings or drinking coconut water; adorning their necks with jewels or slaying others’ with military skill. I could see those foreign bodies moving ‘across borders of geography, culture and language’ and becoming Indian. 

The book also re-creates those times, those bits of the Mughal period which find no mention in popular historical narratives of battles, annexations and mighty edifices. It took me to those forgotten lanes of Indian history where beggars were multi-lingual poets and highway bandits poor Englishmen in Mughal disguise. It welcomed me into forbidden rooms of palaces where feminine love and healing existed alongside hierarchy and politics. The book looked beyond codified History textbooks to show me the Literature of those times and views derived from a window of critique. 

And the book took me by surprise. As it busied me with its fascinating world of people constantly becoming by learning and unlearning, the book quietly slipped away from below my feet my own solidified idea of a pure identity. What does it mean to be a Punjabi Hindu? What is my racial identity? What does it mean to be Indian? Is there something called ‘authentically Indian’? In short, the book shook me as it took away from me my acquired definition of a historical self. While I read about the firangis’ process of acclimatization and becoming Indian, the book planted a storm in my head, interrupting my sense of identity, completely. 

So, what exactly happened when Jonathan Gil Harris, himself a descendent from a long list of migrants and now living and working in New Delhi, ‘traced the outlines of rather different modes of contact between firangi and desi’ by drawing on ‘modern day interludes’ of his own life?

His readers were encouraged to give thought to the following - the concept of body and bodily transformation; the problem of absolute identity; the idea of history hidden in ‘subjunctive’ art and finally, the relevance of connecting the past with the present. To examine each of these individually helps see how Jonathan answers ‘How can a firangi become a Mughal painter?’ with a detective’s eyes and ears which collate stray ‘echoes’ of history scattered around. 

Body

Jonathan asks us to re-imagine the nature of ‘biography’ as a ‘story of bodily transformation in response to the specific challenges of new ecological, cultural and economic environments’, in order to make legible the lives of firangi men and women from pre-colonial times. For this he uses his own body as an archive of migratory imprints, making his own experiences the conceptual premise on which to rest these mini-biographies.

Re-locating meant the body interacting with alien elements – consciously or at a sub-conscious level. Garcia Da Orta, the Hakeem of Bombay and Ahmadnagar, is accidentally welcomed by the scent of a cargo of cloves and falls in love with mango in all its forms. Smells and tastes change him. By gradually being forced to move away from ‘proper’ bodily behaviors mandated by his religion and profession, Garcia ‘inhabits otherness’ – gastronomically, culturally, linguistically and religiously. 

The story of Thomas Stephens shows the complex bodily translation of an Englishman into a Konkani kavi. His passage to India entailed ‘the passage of India’s physical elements through his flesh’ – like coconut water, which finds prominent expression in his Marathi version of the Bible. ‘Is it still my body at all?’ is a question his body's transformation poses. 

The spatial mobility of firangi warrior slaves ensured intimate relations with the physical environments they fought enemies in. New skills and new reflexes had to be found, and a ‘muscle memory’ formed. Malik Ambar, the Muslim slave who grew to design Aurangabad, used his embodied knowledge of a new landscape, something that could have been learnt only after adapting to it. To acquire specific skills to master, a bodily modification had to be cultivated, of sitting a certain way, of using exotic tools, etc. 

A body became another by being clothed in specific ways too. Gifting robes and fabric was a part of  complex hierarchical relations of service and obligation. Bibi Juliana Firangi’s ‘tantalizingly elusive’ story of going from a servant to a royal confidant in Aurengzeb’s harem is a fascinating documentary on the transformation of her body. But it is Coryate’s change from a 'comical' firangi to the Fakir of Ajmer that really shows how ‘his body … become a palimpsest – a khichdi of skills, gestures and linguistic abilities from England and the subcontinent’.

But no matter who reached which part of India and when, the weather had to be weathered and the body had to change in order to abide by the laws of the climate, to survive disease and dysentery, storm and sunstroke. Each of these stories show how it was not just foreigners who arrived in India, ‘India arrived’ in their bodies too, challenging their physicality and eventually re-charting their sense of an identity.   

  

Identity

Jonathan speaks from experience when he talks about ‘becoming another’ yet ‘longing for a core identity – an irreducible part of the self immune to transformation’. Identity, then, becomes more of a Work in Progress, much like the body, a fluid entity and forever in flux. 

‘The First Firangis’ attempts to disturb modern ideas of racial identity, ‘including the white of “white Mughals”'. How space, language, clothes, skill, names, allegiance and professions which 'conduced to multicultural curiosity’ transform not the just the body but the perception of self too. What Jonathan says for Orta is true for every firangi whose account this book carries – ‘Orta’s identity was not singular, but organized around fault lines that split and pluralized him … his lived identity not singular, but multiple.’

While the book examines the etymology of the word ‘firangi’ it reveals to us, through its various ‘stateless shape-shifters’, how the tag of a ‘firangi’ served as a reminder that they were neither Indian nor nationals of places they left behind. This must have led to much mental turmoil. On the other hand, for those like Malik Ambar, the vakil-us-sultanat of Khadki, the reality of not belonging to a single space ‘was an empowering precondition of his ascendency’. 

The paradox ‘of moving yet settling’ which was at the heart of what it meant to be firangi in the 16th and 17th century India is also at the heart of this book. How else can we reconcile Manucci’s Hinduphobia with his embrace of siddha medicine as the Vadiya of Madras? Is a firangi then, ‘an identity at odds with itself’? A contradiction of sorts?

In such permeability of multicultural influences, the term ‘authentic’ loses its purity. The idea that someone foreign can become Indian makes you even ask what it means to be ‘authentically’ Indian? If ‘Indian’ is always becoming something new, can intolerant rigidity of identity hold its ground? ‘What if the ‘authentically Indian’ were to name not a pure but an impure condition?’

After all, it took Jonathan, a ‘firangi’ who became an Indian, to not just show us our own Indian-ness but its foreign facets too. A “white” man’s voice, so to say, but one which could see things through an uncoloured lens. A fair voice. I’ll tell you why. 

The fair voice undoing the ‘white noise’

Jonathan re-opens fading parchments of history, critiques long-forgotten poetry and paintings, and cross-refers to Literature and Arts from across the globe to give us a perspective totally different from the ‘narrative of angrezi cultural, linguistic and racial supremacy’ that colonial accounts are wont to carry. He admits ‘Delhi has arrived in me, I mean that it has seeped into me and colonized me at a molecular level’. It is with this stance that he speaks.

He tells us how not just the Mughal customs but firangi customs were patriarchal too. That the English East India Company actively banned women from journeying to India by sea. He opens the doors of women’s zenanas to show us how they were not about ‘sexual talents that Western Orientalist imagination has traditionally attributed to it’. That a harem was something different from what the ‘white noise of male stories and fantasies about Mughal-era women’ created. 

Jonathan rejects some popular historical accounts as ‘patently untrue’ and lends credence to others by researching them with a magnifying glass. He even exposes how Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador of King James I to the court of Jahangir, wrote a narrative of ‘self-pity party’ by distancing himself as superior to Indians and mocking in awe the ‘Super-exceeding Pomp’ of the king. He freely gives examples of the ‘racist condescension that typifies 19th century colonist ethnography’.

In quip-rich irony he says for Manucci – ‘Manucci needed to adapt to the Indian weather to survive as someone who could complain to other Europeans about the duplicity and ignorance of Hindus and Mohammedans.’

It is not a colonizer speaking but a man colonized by India. A man overturning Euro/Anglo-centric myths about the Orient. Laying the cards on the table, and even inviting Rushdie to see how real women of Mughal history are not mere 'tales about tales' but women with distinctive voices.

Conclusion

‘It gestures towards the work performed by Indian agents, human and non-human, in refashioning Christian orthodoxy into something anti-establishment, an instrument of colonialism into something anti-imperialist, and firangi flesh into something Indian’. 

This book also becomes a 'subjunctive' Mughal painting when we see its topical relevance. The book makes us aware about facts from our past which lie buried under the emphasis on purist identities and divisive ideologies based on religion or caste. Say, how Shivaji’s family history as much as his military tactics were very much the products of a multi-cultural, multi-denominational Deccan culture. Or how conventionally Mughal paintings “allowed” striking trans-cultural details where Ram and Sita both have blond hair. And how art in those centuries acquired a global self where artists like Mandu Firangi ‘borrows knowingly from a Christian-Italian convention to illustrate a Persian translation of a Sanskrit story’.

Here is a provocative thought from the book, as a parting note – 

‘No one single trajectory of Indianness – whether religious, cultural or linguistic – can go uninterrupted for long. At the risk of making a sweeping generalization, one might even say that the ‘authentically Indian’ can never be identified with a singular trajectory but, rather, has always been a series of interruptions and creative responses to those interruptions.’

‘The First Firangis’ is a book to possess. A treasure trove of stories and how they interrupt the most well-founded ideas of becoming, of belonging and of being, Indian or firangi, both.

'The First Firangis' is an Aleph Book Company publication, 2015

[This review was commissioned by Rupa Publications. Views are my own.]

Book Review – Miles to Run Before I Sleep by Sumedha Mahajan

The last sportsperson’s autobiography that I read was Lance Armstrong’s ‘It’s Not About the Bike; My Journey Back to Life’. It was a gift from a friend who emphasized to my unsporting sceptical mind how such books are important to read in the array of other genres that we usually do. Such books? Well, books which show us how legends are made and how they remain so; which are autobiographical but also self-help, because inspiration can be drawn from them; and which bring to us true first-person accounts of people who dreamt beyond the visible. 

Sumedha Mahajan’s ‘Miles to Run Before I Sleep’ is one such book. Sumedha was a married, working woman who was on the brink of embracing motherhood when she decided to take up an extraordinary challenge. She had taken to running in community parks to keep herself fit and out of the hospital, which was her second home because of asthma. While Sumedha’s and her husband’s jobs took them to different cities, Sumedha carried her passion along, so much so that ‘running became my religion’ and she realized soon enough that ‘I am addicted to it and there is no cure’. It is at this point that one phone call from Milind Soman changed her life, as he invited her to run 1500 km from Delhi to Mumbai in 30 days, for Greenathon. ‘I wanted to create history’, and so despite misgivings of her family and unpredictably fragile health, Sumedha ecstatically agreed. 

‘Miles to Run Before I Sleep’ is not just about the physical challenges that she had to overcome but also about the mental struggles she had to undergo as a woman in India – a married woman who leaves her family behind to run, through conservative villages in shorts, or on dusty highways where even relieving herself and cleaning her menstrual blood came without cover. While her body endured, she had to constantly fight the prejudice of onlookers (even her own crew) who were convinced that she would fail miserably, and primarily because she was a woman. This book then becomes a very personal account of not just an endurance runner but of a woman juggling roles while looking for a new identity. Her story is thus rife with issues that beset so many women trying to challenge the lines of conduct set by a society.

‘Why are you doing this? They all had the same questions. What could I say that would explain my reasons my actions, my endeavours to rank strangers? What motivated me, made me push myself to the limit of my endurance? It’s not something anyone would have ever understood …’

‘Miles to Run Before I Sleep’ is Sumedha’s way of making us see and understand exactly this.

Connection, correlation and context

While endurance runners will find enough in the book that they can relate to, three prominent aspects helped make Sumedha’s story one which connects with lay readers, especially because of the correlations the readers can draw between her life and their own. They are – role of parents, a husband’s presence and a flaming ego. 

The Prologue shows us the parents’ instant reactions. Predictably, they wanted to ensure male company during the run and basic physical comfort, at first. Then, once they learnt what the marathon actually entailed, worry and the quintessential concern ‘it’s time for you to run around a baby, not around cities’ escaped their lips. Sumedha signed up for the race anyway, choosing to hear the bits she wanted to. What was left for the parents to do except become cheer leaders waiting at the finishing line, worry and sleepless nights, included? Sound just like our parents, don’t they?

Through the beautifully supportive relationship she shares with her husband, Arvind, Sumedha’s story shows us that side of marriage where ‘with the bib in my hand, I called up Arvind’, not to seek permission for the full marathon but to know his mind, only because she trusts him. Even when he does offer his misgivings the final call always rests with Sumedha. A woman independent in marriage, encouraged by her husband and who decides to follow her in her crew car every weekend only because he cares. A sign that marital dynamics are coming of age, and that not all marriages eat into our ambitions. Something that so many of us experience and thus can relate to.

Then, in so many moments during the long marathon ‘I was dragging myself ahead, but my ego was still not allowing me to listen to my body’. Sumedha’s is a will-power born in her as a child who first feels happy to be able to just play tennis, without even hoping to win it, but soon wants to prove to the people that she is fit and second fiddle to none. On the border is her ego which when defeated (when she gets her first DNF – Did Not Finish tag) rises like a Phoenix soon. With injuries and asthma attacks always hovering in the next polluted town, every blister feeds the ego to push, to move on and further. Sounds quite like mine, and yours? 

The story of ‘Miles to Run Before I Sleep’ is rooted in an Indian context where on the one hand Sumedha is “privileged” to be running as the only woman in the marathon and on the other, ‘I was running through a state where the birth of a girl child was considered to be a curse’. Where either she is seen as a foreigner or asked by little girls to ‘stop wearing clothes like men and dress like girls’. In moments of humour and frustration we see how the ‘Indian highway belongs to the humble dhaba’ really and the real face of TRP-hungry media houses and management politics behind popular shows. By showing polluted cities and towns, man’s role in environmental degradation, around which idea the Greenathon was conceptualized, is given due space too. 

The voice

There is a beautiful simplicity, self-judging honesty and seasoned maturity to this narrator who is looking back at a brave chapter of her own life. Sumedha speaks as if she is talking to you so that some moments remain with you – of camaraderie between friends drinking milk straight from dairy bottles, or of those spent in solitude, reading signs of success in 180 degree rainbows and seeking company in peacocks. There are scenes of loneliness and pain, of bandaging blistered breasts with a sock stuffed in the mouth just so no one knows she is injured. And humorous musings too as ‘I never expected to finish the run with any toenails remaining, but I did not want the first one to go on the very first day of the run’. The voice is of a driven woman and at the same time of one who so many drive over with their prejudices, ‘who treated me as a burden they’d rather let go of’. In this very wavering between energy and demotivation, high notes and low we see the human behind the celebrity, the innermost thoughts behind microphone bytes and the humility of lessons learnt behind the pumping ego.  

However …

While the narration is smooth and, excuse the cliché, breezy, those looking to experience the book as a story per se with a main central character may not find it gripping. Injuries and attacks become predictable after a point and the book speeds up to hurtle towards the finishing line in Mumbai. Perhaps for this reason the road of narration at the end is lined with editorial errors, with the Epilogue inexcusably so. 

In a few places, some generalisations like ‘the educated man is more dangerous than the illiterate one. He is the reason behind the large scale destruction of nature’ seem raw and simplistic. Simultaneously, claims like ‘we had all agreed to be a part of the initiative because we genuinely believed we could make a difference to the environment’ seem tall and unmatched with the personal aim which had led Sumedha on, in the beginning at least. For me, the book would have worked just as well without the pep talk.

Finally …

Many aspects about ‘Miles to Run Before I Sleep’ would seem picked up from the readers’ own lives. Many others make for novel reading for a non-runner reader, like myself. While I cannot say how the book will fare with pro runners, for others who haven’t run a mile yet the book may help reflect on their identity, and the roles they play. It whispers how life, much like the marathon, ‘is not a race, but an endurance run’ and where we are to ‘channel both encouragement and discouragement towards enhancing your performance’ because ‘for every upward incline, there is a downward incline’. 

Sumedha says the run was ‘my passage of self-discovery’. For some, this book might become the same. 

'Miles to Run Before I Sleep' is a Rupa Publication, 2015

[This review was commissioned by Rupa Publications. Views are my own.]

Book Review - Nature Chronicles of India; Essays on Wildlife

I was a 14-year-old adolescent when my adrenal gland malfunctioned. During our nature walk in the thick of Rajaji National Park, Uttarakhand, we had come across two hills of what was casually announced to be elephant dung. The wildlife conservationist had excitedly removed his big hat and poked a long stick right through the centre. In those silent seconds, as my heart beat like a drum in a tin can, I was hoping he wouldn’t say ‘it’s fresh’. What did he say? ‘It’s fresh! They are around!’ Mr. Adrenal forgot his function is to fight too, and simply got me sweating for flight while I prayed to the pantheon of Hindu Gods, with particular emphasis on Ganesha, to keep them elephants from reducing me to pulp.  

These true feelings from my history I would not have ever confessed, had it not been for the “encouragement” I vicariously received from Rauf Ali’s essay ‘My First Days in the Field’ in this collection. Rauf Ali had sat ‘huddled for an hour’ in Sengaltheri forest for the fear of an elephant, confessing how ‘steaming elephant dung continued to horrify me for a while’. 

This reference warmed me up (ignore the pun) to ‘Nature Chronicles of India; Essays on Wildlife’, edited by Ananda Banerjee. I am no scientist, I don’t know Warbler from Babbler, I don’t dream of snow leopards and all I did with my parent’s Down-to-Earth magazines was make cut-outs for my school projects. Thankfully, this collection doesn’t ask for an informed background. In turn, it aims to inform and also entertain as it educates lay-readers about our natural history, conservation of lesser known species, community efforts and personal experiences of conservationists, wildlife experts, researchers, journalists and British colonists. (Yes, them too! Did you know – The process of documenting modern natural history in India started with the colonization of the country by the British? Now you do!)

The book is divided into two sections,  Contemporary Writings, which feature writings from modern researches in wildlife conservation from the Indian subcontinent, and From the Archives, which consists of diverse stories by seven British wildlife writers. The editor has chosen those works which unveil lesser-known species, and writings shelved in corners of libraries,  hidden by layers of dust and perhaps a lazy librarian.

The essays, in a nut turtle shell

Just like no two Zebras can have the same pattern of stripes, each essay in the book is unique, in what it aims to convey and how it puts it forth. The information and experiences, both contemporary and colonial, are interspersed with not just meaningful suggestions towards conservation but anecdotal humour straight from the thickets, or from within the writers’ homes. 

Jay Mazoomdar’s ‘Community Conservation: A Work in Progress’ reads like a travel narrative, combining food with people with statistics with over-due Olive Ridley hatchings. Jay effortlessly informs us about these turtles and of our pet-mistakes through ‘souvenir anecdotes’. By introducing us to Anna, ‘a villager in his mid-sixties … the face of turtle conservation at Velas’, Jay impresses upon us readers the role communities can play. I do wish I had “seen” the eggs hatch, though. Had not an impatient youngster pleaded – ‘You keep saying they are overdue. Just perform a Caesarean, guys!’? 

Krupakar and Senani have been ‘conversing with several generations of wild dogs (dhole)’ and the essay ‘Wild Dogs’ gives us a peek into this elusive species and the travails of trailing them in areas where ‘headlines … like the death of a chief minister in a helicopter crash would reach us a month later’. Mada, in his ‘mini-skirt lungi’ becomes an example of how native tribes can act as invaluable support for researchers, because nature’s lessons are, after all, available for all to learn, together.

Rauf Ali’s account ‘My First Days in the Field’ deserves mention not just for the dung-and-danger connection I mentioned. This memoir shows us in minute detail, the real life of a wildlife ecologist and the tasks he has to master- from learning to drive in a rainforest and communicating with rest house boys without a shared language to managing the red-tape involved in convincing park authorities that the idea of pursuing research on monkeys was not hilarious, and that he did not steal chappals! P.S – He reveals a tiger scam too! 

In ‘Are Warblers Less Important Than Tigers?’ Madhusudan Katti argues in favour of keeping the lens of attention on the mini- and micro-fauna too and embracing a broader ecological perspective. Ananda Banerjee’s essay ‘The Flight of the Amur Falcon’ portrays the ground reality of how grants and assistance can convert ‘a scene of massacre (of the Amur) like no other’ in a Nagaland village to one where government campaigns and even the church get together to protect this beautiful migratory bird which covers 22,000 kilometres in a year!

‘Warm Turtles in Cold Waters: The Leatherback’s Journey’ by Kartik Shanker gives us a smattering of surveys and science and ways to save this fascinating creature. And Yash Veer Bhatnagar’s ‘Lunch with the Snow Leopard’ serves us a lovely narrative of how he went looking for the ibex and how he found a snow leopard looking right back at him! 

The section From the Archives is a fascinating window into the forests of yore through accounts of British civil servants and naturalists, army men and ornithologists. The seven essays also offer a peep into the mind of the colonizer, a foreigner looking to nest in alien territory and among exotic species. 

‘The Lonely Tiger’ by Hugh Allen is a beautifully told story of an orphaned tiger cub. But before Hugh makes us sit on a fork made by a giant tree to look around for the tigers, the essay documents how the first criticisms against ‘over-keen sportsmen’ and the idea of gaming trickled in. Sadly, it required ‘much more plain common sense’ than was abound at that time. Alternating between heart-warming descriptions of a tiger family to wrenching ones of injury and death, this essay moves the reader. The Lonely Tiger’s image like that of – ‘a small boy pondering the cruel fate that had killed his mother first and then his sister, and so condemned him to the heartache of loneliness and unexciting games played on his own’ will linger.

A very short essay called ‘The Seven Sisters’ is so full of wit that even the ‘disreputable-looking’ Babblers would not mind the honest portrayal Frank Finn gives of them. A Babbler is ‘in about the same stage of moral evolution as that represented by the public school boy’ and it ‘could not be dignified if it tried’, says Frank, in all frankness. Oh, and Dehra Dun, my hometown, is probably inhabited by a particularly ‘war-like clan’ of Crateropus canorus. What can I say but beware!

Edward Hamilton Aitken’s ‘The Bats’ is another hilariously enjoyable read. Aitken’s amusing love-hate relationship with this ‘sort of incarnations of Satan’ with ‘extraordinary detective apparatus’ will keep you hungering for more, much like the bat hungers for unripe berries all night long. Almost as an afterthought he mentions their virtues but also says that ‘beyond this in their praise it would be affectation to go: their virtues are not of the striking sort’. I would agree!

‘The Indian Leopard’ by Richard Lydekker is packed with a lot of scientific information about the species. ‘The Kharakpoor Hills’ by Edward Lockwood, ‘The Sal Forests’ by Captain James Forsyth and ‘The Mysore Jungles’ by George Peress Sanderson are significant for the panoramic picture they paint of places and the people inhabiting them. It is an interesting perspective of our homeland by foreigners, and one which we were yet to arrive at. In case you are wondering, no offensive colonial gaze directed towards the natives was found in them (except once or maybe twice) and by and large the descriptions of the various tribes and forest dwellers was ‘truthful and honest almost to a fault’. These three essays document how man and nature coexisted. (As an aside and quite ironically, while Captain James finds the Byga tribes ‘most terrible enemy to the forests’ he enjoys his game, hunting for meat to finally spend a ‘Christmas of considerable joviality in that remote wilderness’ with the dinner consisting of meats of many kinds. Ahem!)  

Wow moments of truth

This review cannot be complete without an interesting list of trivia I gathered from the book. Did you know:

- The sex of a sea turtle hatchling is determined by the incubation temperature. 

- In the abundance of summer, the ibex selects its forage based on the nutritional value of the plant.

- Many trees in forest fires smoulder for months!

- A white-bellied sea eagle usually pairs by the age of six and uses the same nest for the rest of its 30-year-life.

While we as humans cannot follow the ways of the white-bellied sea eagle (age of six!), there are myriad ways in which nature and its creatures hold valuable lessons for us. ‘Nature Chronicles of India’ tells you of the contempt the migratory birds have ‘for human geopolitical boundaries’. The Babbler may be appallingly ugly but with devoted courage this ‘feeble-winged creature will rush to the defence of a comrade held in the grip of a trained hawk’! Even the bats have one lovely virtue – family affection. 

The essays on wildlife contained in this collection can be enjoyed by young and old, informed or not, alike, because they take us beyond Rudyard Kipling and Corbett’s adventures and into the unknown wild. They re-present tales of yore, revive interest in the lesser known creatures, remind us of how we as a community can help in conserving nature and most importantly restore our faith in the basic goodness that runs as a common stream between both the plant and the animal kingdoms. 

However, the book cannot rid you of fear; fear in the middle of a forest with nothing in sight except two hills of just-launched, steaming elephant dung! 

Well, at least I tried!

'Nature Chronicles of India; Essays on Wildlife' is a Rupa Publication, 2014

[This review was commissioned by Rupa Publications. Views are my own.]