The British comedy series Yes Minister is unforgettable as far as the legendary civil services mandarin Sir Humphrey Appleby is concerned. Not cut from the same cloth, but a fine product of the Great Indian Bureaucracy is a man who sold India as Incredible to the world – Amitabh Kant. While Appleby was the unflappable symbol of a machine that has no gears, only brakes, for bureaucrat Kant the key word is can. From his days as the Chief Secretary, Tourism of Kerala where he branded the idyllic state as God’s Own country Amitabh Kant has authored “Branding India – An Incredible Story” and has been a key driver of Make in India, Startup India, and Incredible India. He is the ultimate babu of branding. We take a look up close.
Talking of bureaucrats and government, the whole question of the Right to Privacy is a subject that has come under scrutiny because of the move to link the biometric ID Aadhar to all facets of a citizen’s life. The Supreme Court has ruled that this right is fundamental and so in Platform, we discuss how fundamental the right to privacy really is.
In our Economy section, we explore the success of Lok Capital an impact investing venture capital fund set up to invest in companies that don’t just make money, but are also drivers of inclusion and socially oriented in their goals.
On the global stage, the rocking Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau walks the ramp while we explore the marvels of Moscow in a travel photo feature. Then there is this tiny village in faraway Assam that could give Rowling’s Hogwarts some lessons in the magic world. And to spice up your September, the secrets of Desi Tadka, Global Khana along with the usual columns and features.
Keep reading.
RULING//In a milestone ruling, India’s Supreme Court declared that privacy is a fundamental right for each of its 1.3 billion citizens protected under the country's constitution. India joins the United States, Canada, South Africa, the European Union and the United Kingdom in recognizing that there is such a right. In India, it could have wide-ranging implications. For example, laws that currently criminalize homosexuality could now be struck down on the grounds that what consenting adults do is private.
Nine justices unanimously joined the decision that was an exhaustive treatise on personal liberties. The 547-page judgment overturned earlier cases and declared, “Privacy is the constitutional core of human dignity.” Chief Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar borrowed from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and equated privacy with the "right to be let alone." Khehar wrote: "The right to be let alone is a part of the right to enjoy life. The right to enjoy life is, in its turn, a part of the fundamental right to life of the individual."
Privacy advocates had petitioned the court over alleged data mining and challenged a government scheme that assigns every Indian a unique identification, through a socalled “Aadhaar” card. Critics argued the collection of biometric data in connection with the card was intrusive and could conceivably link up data to a person's spending habits, medical records and even bank transactions.
The court reserved judgment on the constitutionality of the Aadhaar scheme for another bench but said, "In an age where information technology governs every aspect of our lives," the court "has to be sensitive ... to the opportunities and dangers posed to liberty in a digital world." And it called on the government to "put into place a robust regime" for data protection.
The court waded into the issue of sexual orientation, calling it “an essential attribute of privacy.” It slammed an earlier Supreme Court ruling that upheld the criminalization of homosexuality on the grounds that the LGBT community was “a minuscule fraction of the country's population.” The court said that was no basis on which “to deny the right to privacy.” The court said the question of privacy between consenting adults was not for it to decide; the issue of lifting criminalization of homosexuality is, the court noted, before another bench.
But with the day's sweeping decision pronouncing India's fundamental right to privacy, nine justices loudly signaled the direction in which they believe India ought to move.
POLITICS// Goa Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar has won the Panaji Assembly byelection, defeating his nearest rival, Girish Chodankar of the Congress, by 4,803 votes. Mr Parrikar got 9,862 votes against 5,059 by got by Mr Chodankar. Goa Suraksha Manch president Anand Shirodkar got only 220 votes, while 301 people opted 'None of The Above' or NOTA.
By-elections were held in Goa on August 23.
Manohar Parrikar was sworn in as Goa Chief Minister in March 2017 after the BJP formed a coalition government with Goa Forward Party, Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) and independents.
BJP won both seats that went for byelection in Goa as Mr Parrikar's colleague Vishwajit Pratap Singh Rane won the Valpoi seat.
ELECTED// Meet M Venkaiah Naidu, our new Vice President. Naidu, who was nominated by the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), the political group that runs the country, defeated the Congress party’s candidate Gopalkrishna Gandhi.
He will be the 13th Vice-President of India and like the President, hold office for a period of five years.
ATHLETICS// Think of speed on the race track and you think of Usain Bolt. The great Jamaican runner has proved many times over that he is the fastest man on the planet. But last month, in what was his last individual race, Bolt had to settle for a bronze medal in the 100 metre sprint of the IAAF World Championships 2017 underway in London, England. Justin Gaitlin won gold while Christian Coleman came second. Both runners are from the United States. It was only the second individual race final that Bolt has ever lost. Bolt has set the past three world records in the 100 m race, and holds the current world record for the event at 9.58 seconds. Bolt unusually excels at both the 100m and 200 m races and is also part of Jamaica’s gold medal winning relay squad.
ASTRONOMY// Millions of the people across the United States watched as the day darkened and the stars appeared overhead in the middle of the afternoon on Monday, August 21. They were watching an astronomical event that had returned to the US for the first time in 99 years-a total solar eclipse that could be seen across the country. A total solar eclipse was visible for a few minutes in a thin band of land from coast to coast across the US, while a partial eclipse was visible in all 50 states of the country. Along the path of the eclipse, millions of people gathered to watch the spectacle, even as researchers and scientists performed experiments. This may well be the most watched and photographed eclipse in history! Hundreds of students also participated in many science projects connected with the event.
FLU//The dreaded virus swine flu is back, and has already severely affected parts of Northern India. The worst affected state is Gujarat where over 200 people have died due to the disease. In Rajasthan 68 people have died of swine flu in 2017. Other states like Punjab, Orissa and Uttar Pradesh have also been affected. In fact, in Uttar Pradesh, the government has asked schools not to conduct morning assembles to prevent the spread of swine flu. More than 20 people from the state have died of swine flu this year. While Gujarat may be one of the states, Rajasthan, Punjab and Delhi have not been spared the H1N1 influenza, with several deaths being reported from these places. In neighbouring Rajasthan, the viral infection has claimed 68 lives from January 1 to August 17. Of these, 64 patients were from Rajasthan and four from other States. A total of 2,558 samples were collected during this period and 590 of them tested positive. Sixteen deaths were reported from Jaipur district, followed by seven in Kota and four in Ajmer. Rajasthan is followed by Punjab, where 15 persons have died till August 17. Compared to the neighbouring States, the number of deaths in Delhi has been lower, at four. Delhi Health Minister Satyendar Jain said the city had so far treated 1,088 cases of swine flu, with 889 patients being residents of the national capital.
CRICKET// Skipper Virat Kohli has announced that there would be several changes to the Indian cricket team as it begins preparations for the next One Day International World Cup to be played in 2019. Although the event is two years away, Kohli believes that the time to start preparations is here. “I think we need to start planning for the 2019 World Cup. You have to prepare 24 months in advance. We are taking that as a challenge and look to try out different things," Kohli told an Indian newspaper.
His comments may be important as recent news reports have said that MS Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh may not be part of the future Indian team. Yuvraj Singh has already been dropped for the ODI series against Sri Lanka while Dhoni’s performances have not been as consistent as they used to be. It is likely that the team will use the Sri Lanka tour and the next few ODI tournaments to create a new look team for India.
ATTACKS// Europe, which has been affected by many terrorist attacks in 2017, experienced yet another last month when a van drove into a crowd of tourists on a main road in the Spanish town of Barcelona. The attacks are believed to have been carried out by the terrorist group known as the Islamic State (IS), which is from West Asia. Terrorists are people who use violence as a way of getting what they want. The IS, which is trying to get control of some parts of West Asia, is bitterly opposed to European nations that are fighting against it. As a result, IS has launched terrorist attacks on several European cities such as Paris, London and now Barcelona over the past few months. At Barcelona, on Thursday, August 17, a van containing an IS team slammed into crowds on one of Barcelona’s busiest roads. The van drove through the traffic, killing 14 persons and injuring 100 more. Earlier in the morning, a similar road attack south of Barcelona killed one person and injured six others. While some arrests have been made, the driver of the van is still missing and the matter is being investigated by the Spanish police. Five victims are still in critical condition, while another 19 remain hospitalized. Police shot Abouyaaqoub to death after a manhunt; five other terrorists were killed by cops in Cambrils. Officers arrested four others, but let two go due to lack of evidence. Spain tried to deport the Islamic hate preacher suspected of masterminding the Barcelona terror attacks, but a judge allowed him to stay because he did not pose a “serious threat”. In a written judgment handed down in 2014, the Spanish government was blocked from deporting Abdelbaki Es Satty, 42, after he served a prison sentence for drug smuggling. Judge Pablo de la Rubia stopped Es Satty’s deportation using two EU directives which say member states can only deport non-EU nationals who pose a “serious and present threat to public order or national security and safety”.
Kerala was no Kashmir, at least as far as tourism was concerned but then one man changed that profile by making Kerala God’s Own Country boosting its tourism profile around the world. It was in the late Nineties that an officer of the Indian Administrative Services (IAS) from the Kerala cadre along with many others put together a campaign that changed the mindset of a sluggish state to woo the world. Soon Kerala was to become the toast of the world and tourism took a huge upswing – the three magic words had raised Kerala from obscurity to global recognition as a tourist destination, capturing the imagination of millions. The bureaucrat in the middle of this success was a young man in his forties – Amitabh Kant. Along with Kerala, Kant’s fortunes also turned.
Next came the Incredible India. This branding of India put Kant on a different track altogether. Lifting the country’s tourism sector out of the doldrums after the September 11 attacks, Kant built a brand away from the stereotypes of snake charmers and touts lingering at tourist hotspots to better capture India’s new dynamism. Dubbed a “masterstroke of international branding” by the editor of the National Geographic Traveler, “Incredible India” soon became a household phrase.
But the challenge at the start of the campaign looked steep. For example, in a book on the campaign, Kant recalls travelling from Delhi to the Buddhist pilgrimage site Bodhgaya. “The national highway stretch was probably the worst in the world — the entire distance of 96 kilometres was full of large potholes. It has a bone-rattling nightmare — a journey that should have taken a-hour-and-a-half took us almost five hours. No wonder the Japanese and Southeast Asian tourists, who should have flocked to visit the Mecca of Buddhism, had been driven away,” he wrote.
The campaign meant changing some reluctant mindsets, including within India’s bureaucratic machine, about how to give India’s image a facelift. It also meant building infrastructure such as new roads and hotels, cleaning up tourist sites and educating India’s notorious rickshaw drivers on the virtues of realistic prices.
Nicknamed the branding man, project man or even AK-47 for his result-oriented style of operation, Kant has many supporters. More often than not, he’s described by former college-mates, friends, colleagues and journalists as a man driven to achieving results and translating ideas— whether his own or taken from others— into “tangible results”. He is always positive. Whatever the idea, proposal or project, he examines them with an open mind, according to those who know him.
The Make In India lion made up of cogwheels is Kant’s most visible branding exercise in the Modi regime. Though it is too early to predict its impact vis-a-vis turning India into a manufacturing hub, it has been accompanied by a more liberal foreign direct investment regime—again piloted by Kant in his role as Secretary of the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP). The campaign is showing results in defence manufacturing.
A non-Malayali well conversant with Malayalam, Kant grabbed national attention with the branding and promotion of Kerala as a ‘must see’ destination (God’s Own Country) and later followed it up with the branding of India (Incredible! India) as a desirable tourist destination. At that time, tourism was on the periphery. To the Left Front Communist government, it was a bourgeois thing and an embarrassment, but he was able to take it to a higher level
The word ‘branding’ has become so synonymous with Kant that his critics tend to dismiss him as ‘all fluff and no stuff’. Ironically, they criticise Kant’s ability to work within the system irrespective of his political masters. In fact, as one observer is quoted as saying, “winning friends and influencing people is an art at which Kant is well adept. The result is he is able to deliver without ruffling the feathers of his political bosses.”
And those who are part of Lutyen’s Delhi and keep track of Delhi’s power lanes closely are quick to point out that Amitabh Kant functions more like a corporate CEO than a bureaucrat in every sense of the term. You won’t find heaps of files with red tapes on his table. Not just that, Kant like a CEO in a corner room, decides the colours of his sofa set, and the kind of wall hangings, paintings and sculptures dotting his cabin.
By no yardstick is Kant a yes-man, but he knows which way the wind is blowing. The fact that he thought up policy under the UPA (Manmohan Singh) and NDA (Narendra Modi) shows what a smart bureaucrat can really achieve if he puts his mind to it.
Kant comes from a family of high achievers—his father Rajni Kant was an administrator and legal expert; mother Dr Sita Srivastava was principal of Delhi’s Maitreyi College and author of prose and poetry books. His brother is Ravi Kant, CEO of Tata Motors; and brother-in law A.N. Roy was former police commissioner of Mumbai. Kant is a card-carrying member of the St Stephen’s family and a postgraduate from JNU.
Family members describe the 1980 batch IAS officer as hyperactive and a workaholic who never takes holidays but makes time for activities like golf, and even penning a book, Branding India: An Incredible Story, in 2009. He is a dedicated public servant with a very private sector mindset and that’s what has enabled his great success with projects that have caught the fancy of people.
Kant reminisces a bit about his journey and talks about how he comes from a family of civil servants in a recent interview to a national magazine. "When I joined the service, the only intention was to work for the country. We were all motivated by the passion for serving the country.”
So what's next for Kant? Does politics tempt him? He is clear on that count and is categorical: “No, I have no intention of joining politics. At heart, I'm just not cut out for it. I'm a civil servant and I just want to be an agent of change.”
Many feel that part of this success is driven by a belief that the government should facilitate, not do business. This was evident from the start of his bureaucratic career, which he began as an assistant collector attached to the Kerala land revenue department. Among his achievements was the introduction of fibreglass crafts and outboard motors, as also the launch of beach-level auctions of fish as managing director of Matsyafed. In the process, he was able to transform the lot of fishermen by enhancing their incomes. Kant lists it as his “most challenging and satisfying” assignment.
Unsurprisingly, most people who have been closely associated with Kant or have interacted with him note his ‘shrewdness’ and ability to communicate. It helps that many of the government’s focus areas— like sanitation and employment generation—has been tried out by Kant in other guises, like his rural tourism boost under a UNDP project or the Atithi Devo Bhava campaign to promote a clean environment and friendly behaviour by taxi drivers.
Kant was appointed CEO of Niti Aayog earlier this year, in January. The Prime Minister hand-picked him for the job.
Kant, after all, had a 38-year run in the Indian Administrative Service, India's elite bureaucratic corps, where he built a reputation for innovative thinking and a knack for building durable brands. Starting from the God's own Country campaign that transformed Kerala's tourism fortunes, to the memorable Incredible India campaign, to now Startup India and Make In India, seen everywhere from the New York subway to West Asian airports and European trade fairs—Kant's savvy has driven them all.
Under Make In India, Kant identified 25 departments for reform and their secretaries worked on an action plan and were monitored. There is a tremendous amount of work going on behind the scenes and it is yielding results. Besides, now the government is no longer announcing new schemes—it's going to be all about execution.
But Kant is not about all work and no play. "I believe in a work-life balance kind of a thing," Kant is known to repeat. His typical work-day—he's in office by 9 am and rarely leaves before 8 pm. And that's six days a week. "Not working on Saturdays is impossible."
Kant, 61, now occupies a special place in the Indian establishment. As the country attempts to shake off its socialist hangover and doubles down on the trajectory of rapid economic growth of the post-liberalisation years, he has emerged as something of a Sherpa. If Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the messiah of the 10 per cent GDP growth mantra, Kant is a favoured high priest, spreading the gospel from Mumbai to Davos via Hannover, creating campaigns and buzzwords that believers lap up and even the sceptics admire grudgingly.
Obviously, Kant is able to keep pace with the demands of the day, especially the present one which is clearly driven by quick sound bites and campaign lines and also shifts quickly from one stagemanaged event to another. FDI, smart cities, bullet trains, Digital India, Startup India…. the meeting points are too many. Clearly, the two – Modi and Kant – are a marriage made in heaven.
Agrant from the Rockefeller Foundation and with lots of self-belief, the Lok Capital Group was founded in 2000, by Rajiv Lall, Chairman and Vishal Mehta, Partner. The Group works from Delhi and Chennai and has two arms: Lok Capital and Lok Foundation.
Managing a whopping $86 million, Lok Capital has funded more than 19 social enterprises to encourage inclusive growth, something the group is committed to. On the other hand, the Lok Foundation was set up three years later as a charitable trust to promote financial and social inclusion, principally in India by means of targeted grants, technical assistance, research and advocacy.
The workings of the Lok Capital Group are quite simple in its objective. Because of the abject failure of government schemes, there is need to find ways to help improve the condition of India’s urban and rural poor by identifying commercially viable solutions. This is where the Lok Capital steps in to find out schemes that would not only benefit but would also be viable. Government schemes are not necessarily always bad. It fails to deliver largely because of mismanagement, corruption, inadequate research and lack of professional oversight and assistance.
For example, in 2013, The Hindu reported that 83 per cent of the midday meals tested in Delhi did not meet the nutritional values set by the Union Ministry of Human Resources Development. This lapse is not necessarily an incrimination against welfare schemes, but how bureaucratic complacency, venality and excesses create gross inefficiencies under the Indian government patronage, past and present.
The Lok looks for certain key parameters in enterprises to figure out if they are viable or not – things like transparency, customerdriven approach, focus on client protection and companies whose growth and profit models are in line with the Lok’s map. And hence the Social Action Plans (SAP) which guide the audit is of primary import to assess a company’s mission, its goals and systems, processes, products and outreach. The main focus of such an audit of a company’s social performance is to make sure that they can identify the operational risks in a highly competitive economic environment
At a time when private equity investments have not been doing too well, Lok Capital has been able to raise money for its third fund after having performed well in the past 10 years with its first two funds. It chose microfinance in the past and is now looking at micro, small and medium enterprises where the demand is consistently big. The fund is also looking at health care, agriculture and affordable housing. Lok was set up to invest in companies that not only make money but are also drivers for inclusion and socially oriented goals.
About their experience of working with Lok Capital, one of the investors had this to say: “I think there is a general divide between impact and commercial... and that has been going away steadily. People are seeing how impactful investing can be very commercial as well and I think that is one of the reasons why we are backing Lok from fund 1 to now fund 3. They have successfully demonstrated that you can do impact investing with very good commercial returns. They (Lok) are very consultative with their investors. From that perspective, we really like their approach of collaborative working with not just the promoters but with most of the LPs (limited partners), among the team themselves and working with the impacted ecosystem as well.”
The third fund will focus on growth-stage investments in financial services, healthcare and agriculture—with 70-75% of it going into financial services.
The firm has fully returned the $22 million it committed to from its first fund, with an internal rate of return of 15% in dollar terms. The second fund is currently tracking gross returns of 28% in dollar terms, while 75% of it has already been returned to investors.
When asked to explain the stellar returns, Lall said: “...balance in life is extremely important. So, people who have invested in the impact space, they have that sense. It is not like maximizing your returns in every investment you make. It is about making enough and building something alongside.”
Impact investment has been gaining traction in India. According to global consulting firm McKinsey & Co., the Indian impact investment space has seen $4.1 billion worth of cumulative investment in the past six years. Impact investing means 'profit with a purpose'. Such investments can provide financial returns, as well as positive social outcomes
Some of the companies part of the Lok portfolio are MAS, Rural Shores, Everest Edusys, Jana Lakshmi, Suryoday and Bhartiya Samruddhi, all spread across the subcontinent going back to March 2007 when Lok first began Series A investment in Jana Lakshmi. The companies Lok funds and supports together serve 6.8 million customers of which 64% are reportedly women. These companies provide employment to 16,237 people, 16% of them women. According to Lok, their financial service businesses have disbursed a whopping Rs 405 billion ($6.8 billion) worth of loans since the operation, with the 2013 fiscal year disbursements totalling Rs 65 billion ($1.1 billion).
Established in 1995 by Kamlesh Gandhi and Mukesh Gandhi as a Non-Banking Financial Company (NBFC), MAS has over 2,00,000 MSM enterprise customers across Gujarat, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, New Delhi, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu. It’s a retail and wholesale financier that deals in housing, two-wheeler and commercial vehicle loans, to name a few. A glance at their profile reveals men and women who run a small business like footwear shops, bhajiyas (snacks), packaging centres and kiranas (retail store). What’s common amongst them is they’ve received multiple loans from MAS, where banks have repeatedly rejected them.
Everest Edusys was founded in 2011 by a group of researchers, analysts, educationist and policy makers to create an education system with a scientific bent and encourage critical study by designing progressive learning methodologies. Everest hires 69 employees at the moment, and almost half of them are women. Quest Explore Discover (QED) is their flagship product, which, till date, has mapped more than 500 curricula to help simplify excess of 200 science concepts for students. They currently assist 17 private school customers in the peninsula; are in the process of developing 10 Centers for Science Learning that’ll cater to 2,000+ teachers, and maintain 10 Managed Science Centers in 10 different zonal municipal schools run by Chennai Corporation. The latter benefits more than 200 schools. Their latest product Science Labs, hopes to enhance classroom learning through digital technology and activity-based science camps.
Hippocampus Learning Centres was cofounded by Umesh Malhotra in 2010 in Bengaluru. The aim of starting HLC was to provide underprivileged Indian students with the same learning experience he had when his family moved to California for a year. Today, HLC runs 104 of its low-cost education centres. What started as an endeavour to help largely slum children has now expanded to benefit rural students, too. In 2012, Lok invested in HLC.
72% of Indians reside in rural areas. But, 90% of ophthalmologists work in urban areas. That leaves a meagre number of eye care specialists catering to millions of Indians. Kiran Anandampillai and his wife, Anjali, decided to give to the community by getting into the telemedicine industry. Most Indians have very poor access to primary health care, and when Kiran and Anjali met Dr Rajesh Babu, an ophthalmologist who highlighted India’s ‘blindness problem’, they began work to establish Drishti, a low-cost eye care service, in Karnataka. In December 2011, Drishti began the gruelling work of giving rural India access to eye care. In the course of their 2014 fiscal year, they’ve served nearly 25,000 patients, of these 10,000 are women, a group that has even less access to any kind of healthcare.
These are only a handful of those impactgenerating organisations Lok has helped support and invest in over the course of its work in India. The Lok Capital Fellowship Program, on the other hand, helps talented, young professionals work with their investee companies over a 12-18 month period to provide consultancy, analysis, research and advice as part of their mentor-support principle.
Such inclusion needs to go beyond just a financial one and incorporate health, education and social inclusion. Enterprises that enable this kind of holistic development are the ones The Lok Group is most interested in, as they might just be the future of the Indian nation.
At 45, the fresh-faced and good-looking prime minister of Canada looks like a new leaf in a jaded western best-seller where the likes of Donald Trump and miscellaneous neo-nazis tried to claim their pound of flesh in a fierce and militant assertion. That Trump won the mandate despite a less vote share than Hillary Clinton, on a xenophobic, white supremacist, racist and anti-immigrant plank in a struggling and jobless political economy with millions of the working class, especially white working class voting for him, has not really helped him overcome the daily odds which keep surfacing as a ritualistic obstacle race, especially the diabolical Russian card.
That the other neo-Nazis in Europe and Tory Prime Minister Theresa May got a drubbing at the hands of ‘socialist’ Jeremy Corbyn of the Labour Party in a sudden and botched-up poll in the UK, has only sparked a debate that the neoliberal conservative paradigm has once again marked a decisive shift in support of liberals, centrists and left-of centre political organisations. In this twilight zone, which is shifting rapidly, therefore, Justin Trudeau emerges not only as a young and youthful beacon of hope, but also a refreshing departure from the old, fossilized brigade which drums up the same drums at times of crisis.
He is often dubbed as a populist liberal hiding behind a cloak of conservatism and the same-old clichéd free market tricks, but there is no doubt that he has endeared himself to a huge, open-ended and open-minded, nondogmatic support base in Canada and other parts of the world, especially the West. In that sense, he stands apart as a refreshing revelation, like Macron in France and Angela Merkel in Germany.
A student of literature and education at McGill University and the University of British Columbia, and a young, promising teacher, who took up social causes as a youth leader in the Liberal Party, often following up in the footsteps of his father, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Justin Trudeau took a tough stand in the midst of the clampdown by Trump on visas for
certain Islamic countries, which was later shot down by several courts in the US. He said, subject to certain minimum conditions, they are welcome in Canada.
Indeed, he is no Merkel who accepted one million refugees from war-torn and ravaged Syria and other parts of the middle-east in her country, but his open call in support of immigrants and refugees yet again stamped him as a politician who is willing to stand up to his mighty neighbour and military partner, when it actually comes to the crunch. Indeed, he himself visited the airport to welcome refugees, doing the usually famous photo-ops, holding little Muslim children in his arms, with his beatific smile, even while the mother of the child beams away in sheer gratitude and happiness.
Surely, again and again, he has broken protocol and entered the streets, with crowds or demonstrators, to take up a liberal cause, even unconventional causes, a prime minister of the masses. As was the historic occasion when he visited the indigenous people and shared quality moments with them, using his socks as a metaphor.
His multiracial, multi-faith, multicultural pluralism has endeared him as a “true liberal”, in the eyes of his admirers. Writes a commentator in The Washington Post: Correcting for such nationalist indulgences, the liberalism of Trudeau that remains is largely limited to an affinity for mass-scale Third World immigration. The multiracial, multi-faith diversity of modern Canada does seem to genuinely delight him, and his reflex to defend those who “look, or speak, or pray differently than we do” — as he put it to the UN — appears visceral and real…. Some may find this inspiring enough, and in a world where the immigration debate cripples many with indecision and anxiety, any head of state offering unqualified support for one side will be understandably alluring.”
His critics though are of the opinion that he is not really the man he pretends to be; that his position on climate change is shady, that he approves mega fossil fuels, that he really has done nothing on the ground for the indigenous people trapped in reservations; that he has cut down on health care. In other words, that he is usually charming the world and his own people like Barack Obama has done with such remarkable success with usually no concrete results to show, without marking any sharp or radical transformation or realignment of issues which have been simmering for years under various regimes, including on international free trade, among other things.
“You know Justin Trudeau from the Buzzfeed photo-spread or the BBC viral video: the feminist prime minister of Canada who hugs refugees, pandas, and his yoga-mat. He looks like he canoed straight from the lake to the stage of the nearest TED Talk – an inclusive, natureloving do-gooder who must assuredly be loved by his people,” writes a cynical critic in The Guardian.
Come what may, between his lovers and admirers, he has come to stay. For those who derive inspiration from Canada which has welcomed and embraced thousands of people from all across the world – including Indians, especially the hardworking and robust Sikhs from Punjab – he will remain a man who respects and accepts multiple cultures, religions and the essence of secular pluralism, even while pitching for women’s lib and other progressive causes. In that sense, large parts of Canada and its pulsating cities, represent a truly cosmopolitan ecology of social relations, where Sikhs as a community, or the Chinese, can celebrate their language, culture, cuisine, even politics, without any inhibition. Indeed, in the last Punjab assembly elections, many Sikhs and Punjabis landed in India to campaign for the Aam Aadmi Party.
Truly, in a globalized world, Trudeau is no leftist or socialist. Nor is he a radical prophet or messiah. But what is significant is that he speaks a different language, which defies hate politics and xenophobia and which celebrates the multiple layers of multiple civilisational currents.
In this context, if Trudeau seems to have become a young rock star, then, he surely deserves both the photo-ops, as much as the viral social media adulation he draws from across the world, especially among the young, the educated and the women. Indeed, as of now, he is riding on a jolly good wave. And there seems no political indication that the wave is going to subside. It might, on the contrary, become more tidal in the moonlight which shines on him these days.
Most of your personal data is already out in the public domain thanks to your bank, your mobile service provider, your cable wallah, and sometimes even your dentist. And that’s when we haven’t started the conversation on the intrusive apps that you download on your phone or tablet, just to get through your workday a little more efficiently.
Does India really need the westernised model of cross selling at the cost of all your personal info being public? Even if India were to get a privacy law, how well would it work in the current environment? There is so little clarity and hardly any definition or understanding of personal privacy.
Even as a Supreme Court final ruling is awaited, and the government is setting up committee after committee to determine what will be its final stance on the subject, even the mention of privacy brings forth a whole load of varying opinions from people from all walks of life.
For a lot of people, it is as simple as not wanting to be disturbed by a telemarketer in the middle of their afternoon siesta, while for others it is fear that their homes or children may be at threat if unscrupulous people know their daily schedules. As always, there are also those who will say, “I have nothing to hide so how does it matter if my information is public.”
The arguments for and against each aspect of privacy are complex, and the divergent views don’t make it any easier to arrive at a clearly defined “This is right, that, is wrong” answer.
The ‘National Do Not Call’ registry that started in India on 1 September 2007 for instance, was one of the first steps towards an unofficial recognition of the need for a privacy law in India.
All you needed to do was register, and the onus was on telemarketers to ‘scrub’ (compare tele-calling lists against the registry’s list and weed out those who had opted to be not disturbed).
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India had provided clauses to impose fines on telemarketers who called people on the Do Not Disturb list and mandated landline and mobile service providers to disconnect numbers of telemarketers where more than one complaint was received.
It worked. For a while. Then the hardhit Indian telemarketing industry began pressurising the government: millions of tele-callers across India would lose their jobs if the cold calling companies went out of work. It was, after all the only sector where anyone over 18 years of age could get a job, with or without a degree, add to which, the ability to speak English was not a mandatory requirement.
“Our initial approach was that telecallers could only approach people who had actively signed up to receive marketing and advertising offers but the industry protest could not be entirely ignored… not with the depressed economy that prevailed in the mid-2000s. So we had agreed to a ‘scrub list’ approach. Now everything is almost back to square one,” rues a senior government official who was with the TRAI at the time.
He contends that the pressure from the telemarketing industry combined with pressure from operators (fixed line and mobile service who make their money on the bulk calls) resulted in the government looking the other way on slack enforcement. He contends that the pressure from the telemarketing industry combined with pressure from operators (fixed line and mobile service who make their money on the bulk calls) resulted in the government looking the other way on slack enforcement.
The only difference is, “now telemarketers appear to have a firm - albeit unofficial - DND list… last time the furore and support for the NDNC Registry had magnified because ministers and Supreme Court judges were getting calls during work from people offering loans or so on. Now VVIPs don’t seem to be getting such calls,” the official said. As a result, 900000000-odd (900 million) wireless subscribers are a sitting duck for anyone with anything to sell.
The current approaches to the privacy debate are focussed more, on the current Aadhaar controversy and the potential for leaks of the personal data accessible through the UIDAI number
Other aspects, however, don’t seem to have even entered the debate yet. For instance, cross selling of products by banks that narrow in on specific customers based on their bank balances and spending patterns.
“My bank knows my balance because I have an account with it. I wouldn’t want to share that with random insurance agents, or loan finance companies. My personal finance details are exactly that – mine and personal,” says restaurateur Meenakshi Datt.
“Now that banks have gotten into these side-businesses (insurance, share portfolio management and God-alone-knows what else), everything is in-house, at least on paper. So that’s how I get bombarded with calls offering loans,” Datt said.
She has a second account where I maintain just the minimum balance, and use my other mobile number. I have never ever gotten a sales call for that account,” she says, asserting, “to me the sales calls I get for my primary account, that is unauthorised use of my financial data”.
A branch manager with a public sector branch says “not only is it a matter of cross-selling, we are as an economy consciously encouraging debt. Youngsters are being encouraged to take loans for what really should be viewed as non-essential purchases. They are encouraged to spend using credit cards. We are slowly but certainly moving towards a Western model where everyone is always in debt. I am not a right-winger but I believe this will eventually spell disaster.”
A counsellor who helps people work out payment schedules to get out of debt, Arshit Choudhary, says “with the constant exchange of all financial details about all customers, there’s no dearth of computerised programmes that can map out for a potential seller, exactly what appliances you have in your kitchen, how much money you have at your disposal and even based on your previous spending patterns, exactly what you’ll buy this Diwali.”
But with a pending Supreme Court ruling and the government of the day yet to make up its mind on what constitutes privacy exactly, for now, all we can do, is watch and wait.
When he completed his hat-trick by trapping South Africa’s Morne Morkel Leg Before wicket in the third test match at the Oval with his orthodox off-spin, Moeen Ali entered the record books on three counts.
This was the first hat-trick in history at Surrey’s famous cricket ground. The hat-trick also gave England victory, a record breaking coincidence. Also, Moeen is the first cricketer of the South Asia origin to have posted such a record – at least since the princely order faded out. Not since Ranji, Duleep Singh Ji and Nawab of Pataudi, has a sub continental cricketer inserted himself in British history books.
Asked if he would ever play cricket in India, Ranji is reported to have grandly asserted: “Duleep and I are English cricketers.” For that classy disdain, Ranji Trophy cricket was instituted in India in 1934. The year Ranji died, 1933, was, by a coincidence, historic for Indian cricket in another way: the first test match was played at the Bombay Gymkhana. C.K. Nayudu captained India. The English captain happened to be D.R. Jardine, notorious for his bodyline series against Bradman’s Australia.
I find it difficult to resist a noncricketing story about Ranji which I picked up during my travels across Ireland. After his cricketing days, Ranji took to hunting as a sport. A Grouse shooting accident injured him in one eye.
Scouts scoured the British Isles for the finest spot for angling, which was to be Ranji’s next hobby. He was informed that there was no better spot for river salmon than the bend in the river facing Ballynahinch Castle on Ireland’s Connemara coast.
Other than being a magnificent castle facing a hillock on one side and a river on the other, Ballynahinch suited Ranji for another little-known reason.
Ranji, the very “English” cricketer, had a very Indian sister he was fond of. In the male dominated feudal world, she had to be accommodated within hailing distance.Negotiations were started with a convent in the vicinity. The convent would receive endowments. Ranji’s sister would live with the nuns with two non-negotiable conditions: she would not be converted and she would wear a sari, not a habit. To this day Ballynahinch has a photograph of Ranji’s sister in the convent, wearing a white sari, rather like Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity.
Had I not strayed into the Ranji saga, the narrative after the Moeen Ali performance would have been the obvious one: a few months ago there were as many as four Muslims in the English cricket team – Moeen, Adil Rashid, Haseeb Hameed and Zafar Ansari. Why is there no Hindu in the list? Lest I be misunderstood, my curiosity is mostly sociological. My guess is that Hindus overseas involve themselves in matters more serious than cricket.
The phenomenon continues in other cricket playing countries – Usman Khawaja in Australia; Hashim Amla and Imran Tahir in South Africa; Sikandar Raza who helped Zimbabwe beat Sri Lanka.
Most of these players do not lend themselves to significant sociological analysis. They are immigrants from Pakistan. Hashim Amla is the only one who reflects South Africa’s social hierarchies going back to Mahatma Gandhi’s 21 years in that country.
An overwhelming majority of Indians in South Africa, mostly around Durban, are children of indentured labourers, a device colonialism invented to circumvent the abolition of slavery. This class, along with the blacks, was too depressed to be playing a “gentleman’s” game. But a wave of Muslim Gujarati Merchants, who turned up to cater to the British and Indian clients, were financially sound. One of them was Baba Abdullah who invited Gandhi to be his barrister.
Since apartheid South Africa barred non-white students from the better schools, this elite group helped set up English style public schools in neighbouring countries like Malawi under the supervision of such arch British toadies as President Hastings Banda.
It is the progeny of these Muslim merchants from Gujarat who developed a taste for Marxism, as well as cricket, later in British universities. Yusuf Dadoo, Ahmed Kathrada, Essop Pahad, Kamal Asmal, Dullah Omar, Ahmed and Yusuf Cachalia, Fatima Meer – they formed the backbone of the ANC resistance against apartheid.
Once apartheid was lifted, their children joined the all white Rand Club in Johannesburg and sundry cricket clubs. That is the kind of background Hashim Amla would come from.
How does one explain the fine off spinner, Keshav Maharaj, to my knowledge the first Hindu in the South African team currently touring England? Maharaj is actually a contrived title among Indians with a background in indenture.
Brahmins never accepted indenture. For them, to cross the black waters (Kala pani) was a sin because useless action was a sin. But the Brahmin was sorely missed for religious rituals during birth, death, marriage. To make up for this shortfall, the community conferred the title of “Maharaj” on the most educated and one of “Light skin”. The most famous of this genre was one of Nelson Mandela’s closest friends, Mac Maharaj. It was he who smuggled out the manuscript of the Long March to Freedom from the Robben Island across a stretch of the ocean from Cape Town. Keshav Maharaj is presumably from this stock
West Indian cricket, uninhibited by the class stratifications of South Africa, gave full vent to a mixture of slavery and indenture to produce the world’s most scintillating cricketers.
Of Indian origin were brilliant batsmen like Rohan Kanhai, Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ramnaresh Sarwan – all from Guyana.
It has remained something of a puzzle why Fiji, most loyal to the British crown, never took to cricket in a big way. An average native Fijian is taller than a professional basketball player in America. He is also stronger of built. This oversized human machine hurtling the ball from palm tree height would have led to bloodshed in days when helmets were not known. Is this why the Anglo Saxon never encouraged cricket in Fiji?
This village is no hogwash rather more Hogwarts. It’s a pity that Rowling did not find out about Mayong before she created her glorious Harry Potter and the world of magic. For in Mayong too she would find people turning into birds or animals appearing from nothing, or so it is believed. Or better still, like the Cloak of Invisibility gifted to Harry Potter by Dumbledore, village Mayong offers a Cloak of Invincibility if not invisibility. For us who inhabit the world of Muggles all this may seem far too magical and unreal, but for those living in Mayong, it is nothing but reality.
Not far from Assam’s capital Guwahati is this tiny hamlet eerily quiet and silent. There’s something in the air in this untouched, secluded village of Mayong, it holds one of the oddest magical backstories on the planet. Flanked by the mighty Brahmaputra and the Pobitora wildlife sanctuary where wild rhinos roam, Mayong is steeped in the secrets of black magic.
Legends and myths surround the mystery of this place. Stories abound on how the village got its name. Many believe Manipuri people hailing from the Maiibong clan lived in this area once upon a time and that’s how it may have got its name. Others claim that the name is actually derived from ‘Maa-erongo’ or part of the Mother. Every aspect of Mayong seems entwined in a haze of stories. And so the name too shrouded in so many folk tales. When all of the northeast states were one under a common name Assam, it is believed that Manipuris from the Maiibong clan used to inhabit this area and therefore; the name Maiibong became Mayhong with time.
Mayong is a hilly area once full of elephants. In Manipuri an elephant is called Miyong. Hence, a few believe that Miyong became Mayong over the years. And then there is the legend of Ma Kali’s body parts. It is said that the sacred parts of the Shakti Goddess were scattered in the area and the older generation called it Maa-r-ongo, (parts of the goddess), which then became Mayong. In fact, Assam is famous for its Kamakhya Temple in Guwahati where it is said that the Goddess’ yoni had fallen when she was cut up into bits to stop her from destroying the world.
The cultural significance of the place stems from the fact that it is the capital of magic and witchcraft in India. A visit to Mayong brings you face to face with some rare tricks which may look like unnatural practice to modernity but are enough to shake one from within. This place also celebrates a unique festival called the Mayong- Pobitora, which celebrates the fusion of magic and wildlife.
Interestingly, people don’t actually know how this magic came to this little place or how black magic became so popular or who was the first person to practice it. But still, much like our mythical stories, the art and craft of black magic have been passed down over generations.
If you ever visit this village, you would hear a lot of weird and unbelievable stories about people turning into birds or animals been made out of nothing. According to most of the people in the village, these stories are actually true.
Many old scriptures have been discovered which also talk about this place as the land of black magic and witchcraft. It is believed that there are some scriptures which contain mantras that can make someone absolutely invincible. But unfortunately, till date, no one has been able to decode these scriptures.
It is believed that once upon a time people from far off places used to come here to learn the dark secrets of black magic. Today, the village still has a community of 100-odd magicians, but most of them are forced to work on the farm as farm hands.
Those who practice these dark acts are referred to as a Bez or Ojaa, and it is often believed that these people often have ghosts as their assistants. According to folklore, there lived a sorcerer by the name of Chura Bez in Assam. Word of his magical powers spread far and wide, and with good reason. Chura Bez was known to be able to disappear into thin air just by muttering the Luki Mantra. “I was a young girl then, but my grandfather’s stupendous feats are fresh in my mind’s eye. Now you see him, now you don’t – we would rub our eyes in disbelief as he suddenly became invisible, ” recalls his 75-year-old granddaughter, Nareswari Devi in an interview to a national daily.
The Bez of Ojaa also uses the black arts to treat diseases as they seem to have a deep knowledge of Ayurveda. From palmistry to curing back pain, these people can do it all. They can cure your back pain with minutes by just placing a copper plate on your back and chanting some magic mantras.
Today if you visit Mayong you would find a lot of a lot of people who have the ability to perform some unbelievable magic tricks. These people believe that through these mantras one can achieve almost everything. It is said that if one can master all the mantras, then one can turn a person into an animal, turn a leaf into a fish and even fly and vanish. Sadly, this town has failed to receive the kind of attention that it should have. And due to lack of funds and opportunities, this art is slowly losing its popularity and if no attention is paid then the day is not far when it might lose the very thing that makes it special.
According to legend, witches and the saints of black magic took shelter in the Mayong woods years ago. Stories also abound about how in 1337, Muhammad Shah’s army of 100,000 horsemen perished at the hands of witchcraft in a location near Mayong. Excavators have found swords in Mayong that resemble those used to sacrifice humans in other parts of India.
Mayong today is just as dark and eerie, but slightly more open, with the occasional traveller passing through town. The locals of Mayong offer palm reading to these visitors and claim to be able to predict the future with the help of broken glass and seashells.
Witch doctors are also abundant in Mayong. Local healers treat pain by placing a copper dish on the source of the injury and wait for the dish to “eat away” the pain. If the pain is too severe, the dish will overheat and shatter onto the ground. The witch doctors also help catch thieves and retrieve stolen or lost things. The witch doctor places a flower in a metal bowl and according to locals, the bowl starts moving along the ground, completely on its own, until it reaches the lost or stolen items.
Every year, a handful of Indians travel to Mayong either to practice black magic and learn the secrets of witchcraft. The adjacent Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary with the world’s densest population of Indian rhinos is also an added attraction. In fact, the animals and magic of Mayong often go hand in hand. This can be seen at the annual MayongPobitora Festival, which celebrates the fusion between wildlife and sorcery.
Good Morning Uncle: meet Rajat Sharma (name changed). His nephews and nieces (they live in a joint family) wake up every morning to a photograph of flowers, WASP babies, puppies, kittens sent on WhatsApp. “We live in the same house. Nothing I say will convince him to stop and you can’t quarrel with a family elder. Half the Wi-Fi quota is used up downloading the same video or picture each morning that he’s forwarded to the whole family” says political science teacher Manika Sharma.
Rakhi Agrawal’s friends have mostly ended blocking her email address. “She would send one nonsensical e-mail every day. Either it said that some major hospital has issued a warning about AIIDS infected cola bottles, or plastic content in Kurkure, or how reversing your pin number at an ATM would alert bank authorities that you are being held hostage,” said Atula Gupta of her BFF.
“It takes one minute exactly to Google a key phrase from the content, and check it on hoax-busters or urban legends or Snopes (all three are websites which host services to verify if something is a hoax). But, No! She won’t do that. She will simply dump e-garbage because people are too polite to tell her off. She’s my oldest friend and I have told her to stop but she won’t. So I simply block all mail from her. If there’s an emergency, I assume she will call,” said Gupta.
Sangeeta Kumar is an electronic Good Samaritan on Facebook. That, however, is not the issue. The problem is she wants all her FB friends to follow suit. “Her brain seems to have gone into hibernation. She just doesn’t see that these messages are obviously faked. Why would Bill Gates or Steve Jobs donate a dollar per share? Why would Apple give away the latest iPhone to each person who shares XYZ message? Honestly! And why tag your friends every time you find a picture of a sick baby stuck with tubes and an oxygen mask?” asks her exasperated friend.
SP Dutta diligently forwards mail and WhatsApp to friends on issues of the day. About fake Rs 2000 notes bleeding colour, about a well-known journalist’s pro-Pak leanings, about demonetisation, and GST. “The problem is these ‘articles’ quote some real or nonexistent senior government officer such as a former finance secretary, or refer to some imaginary article by a respected columnist and so on, and are full of very official sounding statistics. Interspersed between some real stuff that the person may have said or written is some propaganda. These are examples of cleverly using quotes or information out of context. But the person forwarding them has never actually verified the content personally”, explains Aditya Subramanian, who works in a Chennai based think tank.
Subramanian and Dutta have a common friend and have never actually met each other. “Since he was sending loads of these mails, one time I replied and told him that what he had forwarded was incorrect because I deal with the subject. After that, everything he sends of this nature contains a rider at the end – ‘forwarded as received’- as if that is the perfect defence for spreading misinformation.”And this is now a thing – adding “forwarded as received” at the end of all forwarded content.
Harish Patel’s office colleagues delete everything he sends on the office WhatsApp group without opening the file. “A couple of months back, he sent an obituary message about a former colleague and no one saw it. Why? Because the guy sends at least 10 videos daily. Videos on women being flogged in UAE, funny videos, sad videos about children being beaten by policemen, lifehack videos, how to jump start a car… you name it, he has a video for it,” rues another group member. “He doesn’t seem to get that an office group is an extension of the office and appropriate behaviour needs to be observed. “No one wants this roller coaster of emotion at work looking at tortured animals, weeping women, and then slapstick comedy. Gentle hints have not done the trick. No one wants to get into a scrap with a person you have to meet daily at the office. These days WhatsApp actually lets you see who actually viewed what you sent. Though he knows almost everyone is deleting everything he sends without opening it, the emotional Atyachaar has been never-ending.”
No God or Guru is spared when 70-year-old Rajender Madan goes online. Purporting to come from Allah to Jesus to the 33 crore-odd pantheon of Hindu deities there’s a blessing and a threat, floating around on Social Media for each one. He forwards everything,” says son Surender, who tells angry friends and neighbours that his dad is senile. The messages usually comprise a photograph of said God or a Guru or sect leader and a message. “The basic requirement is that you MUST, IMMEDIATELY, forward the message to a stated number of people (usually 19 or 10 or the like) and then wait for the promised good fortune. Some messages carry small anecdotes about people who got rich instantly or won lotteries. And some include a scary story about the person who didn’t forward it and the calamities that befell him subsequently”, says Madan Junior who is seriously “not amused”.
All the types of people mentioned above have actually contributed in their own way to spawning new content. People have started using status messages like “No forwards please”, “No videos please”, “running low on data”, “my children use this phone” (meaning nothing adult to be sent), “no pics or vids”.
So much so, that many comedians have included in their repertoire an item where they parody a person’s online or social media behaviour by depicting how that would appear in real life. Says Akanksha Bali, ‘In Mumbai, I saw a stand-up act where the comedian did a walk in the park and told total strangers extremely detailed stories about his personal life (all fake of course), and insisted that passersby see videos he found interesting. The best was when he went to a soft-drinks kiosk and told the story about the cola containing the AIDS virus. Everyone laughed.
CYCLING CITIES
Munshi Premchand (31 July, 1880-8 October 1936), also Dhanpat Rai, also Nawab Rai, lived most of his life in abject poverty, alienation and anonymity. His invisibility proved that the mark of genius in terms of Urdu and Hindi literature which has made him a legend was also marked by a life of protracted struggle, personal loss and unhappiness, and relentless penury.
A school teacher always in small obscure schools stretched across the arid landscape of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, he started studying in a madarsa and graduated to become a teacher with a starting salary of Rs 5. He worked across the most remote terrains in difficult, dusty locations, cut-off and solitary: born in Lamahi in Varanasi, he moved from this job to another with low salaries, from Pratapgarh to Bhairach in eastern UP, travelling the landscape of ordinary life in its most stark inequalities, hunger and despair. Perhaps this was the reason that he was meticulous in documenting the bitter realism of the Hindi heartland with such minutest of details, with sardonic humour and satire, laced with the idea of hope and beauty, as much as deep tragedy, loss and loneliness.
Like Somerset Maugham’s classical epic, The Human Bondage, he too explored the human condition in its kaleidoscopic meaninglessness, looking for meaning in life, as much as entering deep into the social psychology of his time, like the characters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, roaming the mean, hungry, maddening and lonely bylanes of Tsarist Russia’s St Petersburg, almost always condemned and exiled, fighting the demons of insanity in his mind. But Munshi Premchand did not go insane; nor did he become a gambler like Dostoevsky, or an exiled outsider in eternal metamorphosis like Franz Kafka of Prague. Instead, he chose to become anti-war, antiBritish, progressive, radical, almost a prophet unknown against the feudal and colonial monstrosities of his time.
A failed marriage, a re-marriage, banning of his books by the British, perpetual joblessness, and the story of utter poverty did not prevent him from joining the freedom struggle and the progressive writers, storytellers, lyricists and musicians, who shaped the high culture of pre and post independence India – a high culture which entered the smallest bylanes of our homes in little towns and villages via the radio, lifting our spirits and telling us that all is not lost. Not even love, in the time of eternal despair. No wonder, even when he had no money, he quit his government job after Gandhi gave a call to quit all government jobs as a mark of civil disobedience.
Shrilal Shukla, another great writer from the same region, wrote the bestseller classic, ‘Raag Darbaari’. He wrote, pithily and with bitter satire that the Indian education system is like a bitch lying on the streets which everyone can kick as and when they want to. So what would Premchand have written if he had been in contemporary India, about the streets of India where blood seems to be flowing almost always on the streets?
The India of mob-lynchers going berserk in the name of cow or beef, the stabbing of a teenager, Junaid, in a train who had gone shopping for Eid, the murder of dairy farmer Pehlu Khan in Rajasthan with legitimate papers for a cow he bought for milk, or Mohammad Akhlaq of Dadri, on false accusations of storing beef in his fridge, the lynching of Dalits in Una who skin cow carcasses for a living, the public murder and humiliation of women in Jharkhand branded as witches – what would Premchand have thought about it all?
Or the killing of farmers in Madhya Pradesh, the death of 70 children because the oxygen cylinders had failed in Gorakhpur – his own backyard, the killing of 30 people who chose to die defending a godman-rapist? Or Gujarat genocide 2002 and the sexy ad campaign of ‘Acche Din’. What would he have written in the postnarrative of Godaan or Rangbhoomi? Would he have called his novel, Raktbhoomi, or Matrabhoomi, or just Nafratbhoomi? Or would he write a long essay titled: Mere naam pe nahin… Not in my name?
The blind beggar in Rangbhoomi knows the truth. The grandmother in Idgah, which still makes us cry, knows the truth of love and poverty on the day of Eid, and the chimta the little one gets for her from the village fair, because her hand gets burnt on the tawa in an angethi with raw fire. The characters in Godaan will tell us the truth about Premchand’s India, the cowbelt, and unravel the mysteries of the human mind in a casteist and patriarchal feudal order ruled by the British.
His second wife who went to jail on the call of Gandhi would tell us how the first feminists were made in India, fighting for freedom, like Kalpana Dutt and Aruna Asaf Ali. Every character is etched with subtlety and precision, with both tragedy and satire moving upstream, against the stream, and turning the tide of a mundane life, into an epical testimony of complexity and patriotism layered with shadows and twilight zones. In that manner, Premchand did not craft any magic realism like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie. He only tried to document in his own complex and understated, satirical, deep manner how India of that time was designed, and how it is refusing to change. Has India changed in contemporary times under the umbrella of manufactured media consent, the mediocrity of literature, cinema and aesthetics, and the advent of a self-styled superman at the helm of affairs? How republical is the Republic?
If only Premchand can be reinterpreted, he would show us our own cracked mirror, especially in the Hindi heartland. No wonder, another great, Satyajit Ray from Bengal, made two epical films based on the literature of Premchand: Sadgati and Shatranj ke Khilari. The first on the oppression of a bonded Dalit labourer, played by great actor late Om Puri, and the second, on the dying regime of singer, dancer and lover, Wajid Ali Shah, who brought alive Krishna’s Raas Lila in his courts and love chambers in Awadh, in authentic Ganga-Jamuni sanskriti, even as the British advanced and captured Lucknow. With the late Saeed Jaffrey and Sanjeev Kumar, both great actors by any world cinema standards, Ray documented and sketched the refined embroidery of this town next to a flowing Gomti, even as the chess game became a metaphor of death, dying and defeat.
However, Premchand will never become a metaphor; he will never die, or face death, or be defeated; this is because he is as great as any great writer ever born on planet earth. His tragedy was that he was never translated. And, yet, in the last moments of his life, he was elected as the first president of the Progressive Writers’ Association in India in 1936, which was a unique assembly of the finest in the land. He deserved the honour, in his humility and his invisibility. Truly, Munshi Premchand, the legend and the humanist, will never ever die in the annals of literature. His legacy will live on.
Like his classical political and literary journal, ‘Hans’ which collapsed along with his printing factory, and which was revived by another great writer, Rajendra Yadav in the 1980s. Since Rajendra Yadav's death, his daughter continues to bring out this classical masterpiece, where writers from remote areas still write beautiful and deeply moving stories and critical essays. A postmaster, a station master, a school teacher — these are the writers who are the living legacy of Munshi Premchand. No celebrities surely, but they are the flesh and blood of a certain greatness which continues to defy the metro-centric celebrities of mediocrity and opportunism. That is a tribute to Premchand, like a graffiti written on the wall: Not in my name.