by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: History Repeating – Why Populists Rise and Governments Fall; Author: Sam Wilkin; Publisher: Profile Books/Hachette India; Pages: 288; Price: Rs 599
Take a prosperous country facing a recent economic crisis where there is suddenly an improbable candidate for top office – a businessman claiming to be so rich as to be incorruptible and pledging to revive industry. He easily wins with support from rural areas, but in power, alienates the middle class, faces enquiries but sacks officials probing him, lashes out at criticism, and promotes his business interests.
If you think this only describes Donald Trump, you are not correct. These attributes also fitted Thailand’s Thaksin Shinawatra – at the start of the 21st century.
The Brexit vote or Trump’s victory are so taken as crowning examples of populism that the electoral, or otherwise, success of several political leaders, who promised to change the status quo to restore old glories/build a new order, get forgotten. Also the virulent criticism of this polarising path to power usually leads to its fundamental causes, beyond the specific reasons, to be ignored.
As this book shows, the instability or other unsettled conditions that give rise to populism occur regularly in history. Taking the twentieth century, the time when the common people’s views began markedly influencing politics, then its practitioners and/or beneficiaries range from Vladimir Lenin to Juan Peron to Ayatollah Khomeini, besides Shinwatra, Greece’s first populists and some more.
Risk analyst Sam Wilkin contends here that their success – in getting into power at least – of these otherwise disparate political leaders is rooted in a phenomenon, he calls “mobilisation politics”, which can see greater public participation than conventional electoral democracy can ever aspire too – or counter.
Giving the example of Brexit, whose result came about through the participation of nearly three million citizens who had not voted in the previous general election – or any election for that matter, he notes the force that can compel millions of otherwise uninterested people to get out of their comfort zone to take an active political role does need investigation.
And despite what they feel, it is not the leaders that matter here, he shows, underlining how he seeks to explain “how such moments of turmoil come about, by telling the stories of leaders who wanted rebellions, mass uprisings, or votes against the establishment, and got them – occasionally to their own surprise”.
Its also not the people, for as Wilkin, beginning with an uncompromisingly uncomplimentary view of the political proclivities of the general public at large, observes that someone with dreams of leading the people to topple the exclusivist establishment, depose a corrupt and unjust regime or a better future, will find that fellow citizens are “sheep”.
“‘Let’s remake this great nation!’ you will cry. ‘Baa,’ they will bleat contentedly, distracted by salty snacks and Instagram,” he writes.
So then, how does this mobilisation politics work? It happens when, says Wilkin, when the conditions are right and the politicians are “no less the victims or beneficiaries of broader conditions”, while how much the people chant “egomanius incarecrus!” or “referendi reverso!”, such magic doesn’t fix politics.
Ruling out the two usually cited reasons – economic or psychological distress – he uses the cases of Shinwatra’s Thailand, Czarist Russia, Shah Raza Pahlevi’s Iran, Peron’s Argentina (which we learn was the only case of a modern prosperous country that descended to straitened circumstances) to show how stable seeming nations crack up when the circumstances so align.
Meanwhile, his final example – of the US of the 1930s where Louisiana Governor Huey Long, or the “Kingfish”, exemplified a unique brand of populist politics that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt later appropriated, shows how this tendency can affect mainstream politics.
Wilkin ends with a handy guide to determining your own country’s survival prospects in face of the populist onslaught.
Packed with hillarious accounts of seminal historical events (eg the drunkenness at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg during Lenin’s Revolution, the life of Thai royal pet ‘Foo Foo’, and the poetry readings that were behind the Iranian Revolution), some redoubtable women – Lenin’s mother, Eva Peron and Carrie Nation, and men – Ali Shariati, and solid insight into political instability and political participation sprinkled liberally across the case studies, the book is not only for politics aficionados, but anyone who wants to understand how and why our present world became this way.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Mohammed Shafeeq,
Title: Day and Dastan (Two novellas); Author: Intizar Husain; Translated by: Nishat Zaidi and Alok Bhalla; Publisher: Niyogi Books; Pages: 190; Price: Rs 395
“Din Aur Dastan” is one of the more famous works of Intizar Husain. Nearly six decades after this India-born Pakistani Urdu writer penned the two novellas, Nishat Zaidi and Alok Bhalla have come out with its translation for English-speaking readers.
This is a remarkable juxtaposition of two distinct styles of storey-telling Intizar was known for. “Day” is the realistic story of a feudal joint family, a story steeped in the nostalgia of personal past yet a symbolic reference to the trauma caused by India’s Partition. In “Dastan”, Husain exhibits fictional inventiveness to narrate through surrealistic imagery stories in the backdrop of the 1857 War of Independence.
The partition of India was one event which had a huge impact on Urdu literature and with Intizar Husain himself being the creation of partition as a writer, nobody else could have given a more realistic account of the cruellest of the events.
One of the most celebrated writers in contemporary India and Pakistan, much of his fiction was on memories of his boyhood, a ‘qasba’ in Bulandshahr district of Uttar Pradesh, and the tragedy of partition.
One of his famous novels, “Basti”, written in 1979 against the backdrop of partition, was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2013 after it was translated into English by Frances Pritchett. He was the first Pakistani and the first Urdu writer ever to be nominated for the international award.
One of the well-known faces of modernist movement of Urdu literature, Husain was recipient of Sitara-e-Imtiaz (Star of Excellence), Pakistan’s third-highest civilian award.
In 2012, he was given Life Time Achievement Award at Lahore Literary Festival while in 2014 he was given the French Officer de L’Ordre des Arts et des Letters award for his achievements. He passed away in 2016 at the age of 93.
Like most of his fiction, “Day” captures the life in the backdrop of communal harmony, a culture in which the writer grew up.
Husain’s detractors had always accused him of being in Pakistan temporally but mentally craving an earlier life and culture in India.
“Day” is the story of Zamir and his cousin Tahsina, their growing up together, his return to the town, their repressed emotions, the family losing their ancestral haveli in a law suit, his father’s decision to build a new kothi on the town’s periphery, the family shifting all its belongings to the kothi even before it was completed and the refusal of Tahsina’s mother to shift to the kothi.
As Nishat Zaidi writes in her introduction, the novella refrains from making any direct reference to the Partition and the trauma of migration but it does deal with a world changed by it.
Like Husain’s other works, “Day” also captures the daily life in vivid details like the streets, temple, trees, flowers, colour-changing chameleons and insects.
The other novella, “Dastan”, is a traditional tale of wonder. Through his surrealistic symbolism and his mythological spin, he created authentic narratives to revisit the tragic events of 1857.
The ethical question in Husain’s stories is not anthropocentrically frames, but rather encompasses the flora and fauna; the entire landscape, and all things living and dead, writes Zaidi. “The ecosystem exists contiguously with the human world. It is not a metaphor. Human and non-human agents are part of one scene, wherein they exist separately and yet act upon each other, forming one syntag,” Zaidi writes.
She quotes Husain as saying that unlike ancient stories which thrived on communication between humans and non-humans, and in which man appeared as part of the universe, the new-age storeyteller began to write tales of only the human world. “The tragic outcome of this loss of the non-human is that man himself metamorphosed into a demon, Zaidi writes.
To this extent the presence of the non-human is more pronounced in “Dastan”, written in two parts “The thunder of rivers” and “The screams of the horse”.
“Through the novella, facts and historical events are woven into the essential threads of Dastan, that is Ramz (war), Bazm (assembly), Husn-o-Ishq (beauty and love) and Tilsim (enchantment),” Zaidi points out.
It has a mysterious black river which forces the gallant to jump into its dark waters, a throbbing desert and a rotating tower, an empty city with vacant houses, faqirs who mysteriously appear and disappear, a horse whose neighing foretells events and a parrot that shows direction.
Husain construed Islamic history as continuum by tracing back post-Partition crisis to the desolation of rebel soldiers of 1857 lead by Bakht Khan, anti-British battles of Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, the glorious reign of Shershah Suri, and finally back to the martyrdom of Imam Hussain in the battle of Karbala, Zaidi noted.
(Mohammed Shafeeq can be contacted at m.shafeeq@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?; Author: Frans De Waal; Publisher: Granta Books; Pages: 352; Price: Rs 499
Pet lovers swear by the intelligence and empathy of their dogs, cats and other charges, many social media users spend much time chuckling over pictures of animal antics, an octopus forecast the 2010 Football World Cup result, a goat of Brexit and a monkey, a tiger and a polar bear of the Trump-Clinton presidential contest. Dumb animals still?
Animals, or rather other animals’ cognitive abilities forms the crux of a major scientific debate. Humans, on the basis of their ability to make and use tools, and exhibit a sense of identity, and of time, have been long prone to believe themselves the planet’s preeminent – and only – thinking species.
But, as this book shows, we cannot hope to retain this exclusive status, in light of increasing evidence that animals, beyond our other primate cousins, exhibit cognitive behaviour – but in their own way.
Dutch-American biologist de Waal uses a combination of zoological history, anecdotes, personal and otherwise, and scientific and philosophical challenges in the field and how they are being faced and examples – not only from apes, but also crows and parrots, dolphins, elephants, sheep, bats and even wasps to show how we have long underestimated our fellow living beings. Kafka and Wittgenstein also figure.
Beginning with his own experiences of watching a female chimpanzee transport her bedding outside and an other one taught to raise an orphan – a time-consuming affair – say goodbye to the others before heading for her “duty”, he however notes that there are still those who would question the mental capability of animals, despite the experiences and experiments of scientists studying the matter.
“Are they making a reasonable assumption or are they blinkered as to what animals are capable of? And why is humanity so prone to downplay animal intelligence? We routinely deny them capacities that we take for granted in ourselves..,” he holds.
De Waal answers his own questions by holding the inherent human bias, and belief in their exclusive superiority, which stops many from even considering the possibility. This, he contends, is the primary obstacle to overcome- as the book’s title says.
For most of the 20th century, he says, science was overly cautious on the subject, with attributing intentions and emotions to animal seen as naive, with the two dominant schools either viewing animals as either “stimulus-response machines out to obtain rewards and avoid punishment” or “robots genetically endowed with useful instincts”.
And the reason, as he shows, was a skewed playing field with the scientists seeking replications of human skills and the animals’ earlier poor performance had more to do with the way they were tested than their intelligence, as the tests did not “fit an animal’s temperament, interests, anatomy, and sensory capacities”.
De Waal goes on to cite two experiments where a slight change in circumstances made gibbons and elephants use tools to achieve their goals, before going to prove his thesis, with a mixture of stories, experiments and observations but never overdoing non-human cognition.
He focusses on “umwelt” or an organism’s self-centered, subjective world, while showing that animals are capable of cognition, or basically information processing. But stressing while cognition is the mental transformation of sensory input into knowledge about the environment and its flexible application, while intelligence “refers more to the ability to do it successfully”, he shows animals do not lack either.
His examples include Ayumu, the ape in Japan, whose photographic memory allows him to quickly tap a series of quickly-disappearing numbers on a touchscreen in the right order, though the fact “that humans cannot keep up with this young ape has upset some psychologists”, bonobo Lisala, who can not only use tools but remember when they may be needed, elephants who can recognize themselves and others, and the chimpanzees who can discern parents from a series of photos they are shown.
Also dealing with the question whether animals can be said to have “culture”, considered an exclusive attributes among humans too, while giving unheralded scientists like German Wolfgang Kohler and Russian Nadia Ladygina-Kohts who set the stage for animal cognition research their due, De Waal makes a convincing case against “dumb animals””- which, he proves, is a fairly recent phenomenon.
Will we believe him? It may be a seminal test of human intelligence!
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books, Entrepreneurship, Success Stories, Women Entrepreneur
By Saket Suman,
Book: All The Lives We Never Lived; Author: Anuradha Roy; Publisher: Hachette; Price: Rs 599; Pages: 335
In a shattered world of lovelorn characters, Anuradha Roy’s recent novel yearns for “all the lives” it “never lived”, gently unfolding a narrative whose heroes share traits of villains and villains of heroes — all held together by “a fragile contentment”. Traversing a family’s melancholic journey through the trials of time, or perhaps callings of the heart, this is a novel that comes but rarely in our day and age.
And yet it is a story devoid of heroes and villains; the rights and the wrongs; liberties and prejudices — it evokes a curiosity for everything but, in the end, leaves you pining for nothing. Anuradha’s is a little universe, crafted with attention to minute details and progressed with an effortless narrative that floats in her rich prose and diction.
But this little universe inhabited by a lonely child Myshkin, who grows old as you navigate through its pages; his once subdued but always carefree mother Gayatri; his atheist, nationalist and often difficult to comprehend father Nek Chand, can also turn magnanimously large in its context.
Along the way are appearances by Tagore and Walter Spies; events of the second World War collide with the cutting down of trees many years later and aspirations of India’s freedom movement are thrust against the backdrop of art and the everlasting pull that it has for artists. But above all, strange are the manners of the human heart and, like in real life, the characters are firm, albiet whimsical, when it comes to dealing with their emotions.
The most compelling aspect of the narrative is governed by the simple fact that it stays as true to the truth as a novel possibly can. The characters follow their hearts and do what anyone would do when placed in their shoes. Often, there is actually nothing else they can really do other than remembering the good old lullabies or writing letters in their remembrance. But it is neither nostalgia nor regret.
At the onset, the reader is on a constant quest of finding where the past begins. Setting the narrative straight in the very first sentence, the readers are told: “In my childhood, I was known as the boy whose mother had run off with an Englishman.” Even as one event leads to the next, the readers are aware of an upcoming destination — when Myshkin’s mother will “run off” — thus the hitherto anticipation finds a greater push once Gayatri actually runs off with Walter Spies, leaving behind her husband and of course, young Myshkin.
Crafting the plot of an intriguing novel is the forte of a creative mind but presenting it in indisputably flawless sentences that soothe the reader’s heart is an art that comes with maturity. The novel presents a master storyteller at work: matured in her view of the narrative, calm in her tone, rich in language, profound in the experience she creates and yet so observant of the affairs of men.
The novel touches upon a range of piercing societal issues — women’s rights, art, environment and nationalism, to name a few — but nowhere does it sound preachy in its narration. It is not a protest because Anuradha, as the writer, or Myshkin as the narrator, are not complaining. Instead, it is a recollection where the story that Anuradha has written is actually being recalled and reflected upon by Myshkin as we flick through its pages. So, the story is being written inside the story and the readers become a part of this profound experience, woven together by little fragments that break the realms of time and geographical boundaries.
A novel that is global in its appeal and yet Indian at its heart, there is never a dull moment in “All the lives we never lived”. There is no anticipation of a sudden twist but it is the overall experience (of which the reader too becomes a part) that will win many prospective readers for this once-in-a-lifetime novel.
It is not a soothing balm on an aching heart, it is the ache and it is the relief.
Novelist Anuradha Roy, a brief introduction
A writer who seldom makes public appearances, Anuradha Roy rides against the tides of our times and is known for three previous outstanding novels — “An Atlas of Impossible Longing”; “The Folded Earth” and “Sleeping on Jupiter”.
Her works have been widely translated in Asia and Europe, in languages such as Dutch, Spanish, Arabic, French and Italian.
“Sleeping on Jupiter,” a novel about religion, love, and violence in the modern world won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2015.
Her latest novel is “All The Lives We Never Lived” and it presents a master storyteller at work: matured in her view of the narrative, calm in her tone, rich in language, profound in the experience she creates and yet so observant of the affairs of men.
Anuradha studied English Literature at Presidency College and at the University of Cambridge. Her essays and reviews have appeared in newspapers in India, the US and Britain.
She lives in Ranikhet.
(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House; Author: Mark Felt (with John O’Connor); Publisher: Ebury Press; Pages: 368; Price: Rs 499
An American President is elected in a divisive election, in which a section of his supporters used purported criminal means – including stealing or trying to steal the opposition party’s confidential documents; the FBI’s inquiry into the matter is stymied by the new administration but leaks and dogged journalists bring out the scandal into the open. Donald Trump’s US?
No, this was the US in 1972-73, the time of President Richard Nixon – and Watergate.
Though there are many similarities between the two times and tenures, there is one crucial element missing from the present period – a senior FBI official who undertook an unprecedented, lone and surreptitious operation to ensure the cover-up failed.
It is in this book we learn his full story – and why it is important, as well as his likely motivations.
We have known him long as “Deep Throat”, a name inspired by the contemporary pornographic film and given to him at The Washington Post, whose reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein he guided in their investigation. But even after FBI’s then Deputy Director Mark Felt revealed his identity in 2005 – over three decades later, we still don’t know much about why he played this mysterious role – as can be seen in the film version of Woodward and Bernstein’s classic “All the President’s Men”.
Attorney and author O’ Connor, who successfully worked out Felt’s identity in 2005 and convinced him to confirm it, tries, in this book, to solve the mystery behind the man, who worked towards the exposing one of American politics’ biggest scandals – but did not even seek acknowledgment for what he did.
Watergate’s denouement, leading to Nixon resigning in disgrace and going on to refashion politics, media and law enforcement – and their relationships – far into the future (Well, at least till our “post-truth” world). But why Felt did what he did and did not reveal it till he was was over 90 has been perplexing.
Twice passed over to head the FBI – which could have contributed to his decision, Felt did not even tell his family about his secret exploits, leave alone in his (largely unknown) memoirs, published in the early 1980s.
But O’Connor, in this revised and updated version of his 2006 recasting of Felt’s autobiography with additional information from Felt and his family and other sources, tries to solve what led to this career FBI operative to become a secret informer to political shennigans.
Though Felt is reticent to the extreme – even in the chapter on Watergate, he makes no mention of his secret counselling of Woodward. All he says is that he must give some credit to the press without which “much of the White House involvement in the break-in (in to the Democrat National Committee office in Watergate) and the subsequent cover-up) would have never been brought to light”. Also, “people will debate for a long time whether I did the right thing by helping Woodward”.
O’ Connor, noting Felt’s memories had faded due to dementia, is forced to reconstruct with the help of his formerly secret files and interviews with family and colleagues, answers to “three important aspects” – “why he initiated his high-stakes garage meetings with Woodward, how he planned and managed those meetings, and how he escaped detection at the FBI”.
And while he tries to do so, to to the best of his ability and understanding (Woodward’s own “The Secret Man: The Story of Watergate’s Deep Throat”, which came in wake of Felt revealing himself, is also a useful supplement), the major motivations can be discerned from the recounting of Felt’s career in the FBI.
As we learn, Felt was a competent, conscientious and dedicated FBI operative – at the cost of his family life – who unearthed Nazi and Soviet spies, tackled mobsters, cut through red tape to solve cases and get information, got on well with his legendary chief J. Edgar Hoover, and always opposed political interference in law enforcement.
While these could go a long way in explaining why Felt fought his lonely and secret battle, his example is all the more relevant today when political leaders invoke all kinds of justifications for their questionable actions and suborning of law and justice for the purpose.
This makes the book a must read for any one who cares about rule of law and accountability.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
