An ordinary man

Everyone has a story to tell. And people in the unlikeliest of situations display an understanding of the world and a common sense that often jolts the jaded. As it did me, as I journeyed from Pune to Mumbai by road, and out of ennui ended up talking to the driver.

Mahesh is from Jharkhand. He has lived in Mumbai for more than 25 years. He has a wife and three children back in his village. His daughters have just attained puberty and are getting close to 18. He knows that the village will expect them to get married and he is on the lookout. His son is in school.

Leaving his family in Jharkhand was a matter of choice. He says he does not want his family to live like dogs in a slum in Mumbai when they have a perfectly respectable existence in the village. He owns land. It is scattered over the village. Every year he goes home in June or November, to coincide with the rice sowing or harvesting time. He has one crop a year, totally rainfed. In the winter his wife plants root crops and some vegetables. Asked why he did not resort to borewells, he offers the sophisticated argument that it does not make sense to invest in a pumpset when the holdings are so scattered. Besides, he says, look at Punjab. All the groundwater is gone.

What about irrigation schemes?? A big canal project was launched by Indira Gandhi when she came back to power. Much fanfare, a big occasion. A few years later she was assasinated, and coincidentally, work just died down and stopped. Now even the mud has caved in and in concreted areas, soil has filled the canal.

The discussion leads to corruption. I ask him about Madhu Koda, the infamous former Chief Minister who has set Olympic records in stealing money. He observes sarcastically that Koda will lead a comfortable existence in hospitals and then will be set free. Koda was an independent with no support, no credentials, who was propped up by one party just to deny the other. And this is what happens when you put people without any credentials in positions of power, he says. What about the current government, I ask. He shrugs cynically. They are all the same, he says.

I ask about whether the creation of Jharkhand was a good idea. He was quite happy as a Bihari and now is happier as a Jharkhandi. In the last ten years every village has been electrified. There is a sense that the development machinery is moving. He has nothing good to say about the government of Chez Yadav. Nitish, he says is doing well.

He elaborates that Bihar and Jharkhand are truly blessed. One state has very rich soil and abundant water - if only the politicians stopped stealing money from the PWD the perennial problem of the Kosi overflowing its banks due to upstream dam openings can be solved, he says. The other is rich with forest cover and natural wealth. He says there is no logical reason for the tremendous poverty in these two states.

He learns that I am Tamil, and shares with me that he has driven clients to Tirupur, Coinmbatore, Madurai etc and spent a month there. He confesses Tamil is an alien language to him. I gently tell him that for many Tamils Hindi is as alien a language. He expresses wonder at why so many Tamils learn Hindi, and he displays awareness that in the past the issue of language nearly split the country. He wonders how we stay together as a nation. He tells of taking the Alleppey Express from Alleppey to Bokaro, the number of languages you encounter - Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Oriya, Chattisgarhi and finally the Jharkhand dialect. He speculates that perhaps the fact that we are a Hindu majority nation is the reason why. That, and British Rule I add. He agrees. He says after all they built all the railways that the ministers now exploit. He wanders on to the subject of our leaders just after Independence. He says that after spending so many years in jails, Nehru, Patel etc would have had no experience of government yet they managed to create this nation. He thinks they are great men. If only they had settled Kashmir as well we would not be in the situation we are in today, he says.

By now we are nearing Sion, and I see pictures of the Thakeray family and ask him the obvious question. He then educates me on the economics and politics of labour mobility. He tells me that the average Maharashtrian labourer has high expectations of wages which the local industry cannot bear. He tells me he has heard how China makes everything cheap and exports it, and he says if India has to do the same, work has to go to those who will bear the cheapest wages. Biharis and Jharkhandis will work happily for Rs 5000 a month, whereas the average local labourer will be unhappy. Construction work in Pune and elsewhere has stopped, he says, as labourers flee, and factories are closing. Who will this hurt most, he asks. Biharis will happily go the Tirupur to work in garment factories, he says, and the Tamils dont treat them badly...

I ask him about his son, what he wants him to do. His son is in a mission school run by Jesuits. He is a hostel resident, and the boy has ambitions. Mahesh says that the son will not come back to the land. To earn a living from agriculture means you need to do three crops a year, leave part of the land fallow to recover, invest in fertilisers and inputs, and have access to labour. This is difficult, he says. So when his son gets a job, he will sadly sell the land that has been in his family for generations. I suspect his ancestors got their first "pattas" after the Permanent Settlement.

He offers the sentiment that missionaries get a bad name for doing good work. They do try and convert people, but then where are the free schools run by Hindus, he asks. Religion cannot live on empty stomachs and empty minds, he says.

I sit back in silence as he navigates the tough traffic near Dharavi to get me back to my five star comfort, and ponder this whole exchange. Nothing remarkable has been said, no insights offered. Foreigner as I am now by choice, Indian as I am in my heart, I was quite profoundly struck by how very sane this absolute non-entity of a human being was. How rooted in his sense of self, his self-confidence in his world and in his abilities. Aware of the world and aware of its possibilities.

An ordinary man - ordinary, but a man nevertheless.

Google and China

Google has attracted a lot of positive attention in the United States because it has "stood up" to the Chinese government and refused to submit to censorship any longer. The operative words are "any longer", and the company took this stance allegedly because of Chinese attempts to hack into gmail accounts of known dissidents. The fact that they have now told the Chinese censor to stick it is quite worthy of applause. However this beacon of free speech - along with that other champion of open society Yahoo - had no problem putting in the necessary filters, sometimes going out of the way to satisfy the Chinese authorities. Indians would recall that Google Maps of the Indian North East show the state of Arunachal Pradesh as being an Indian state in the worldwide edition, but non-existent and a part of China in the Chinese version.

So why this newly found sense of morality and values? I look for some clues.

First, Google intends to position its online applications and connectivity as a real alternative to the desktop. Gmail is no longer a beta application from Google, it is a mainline offering that has found acceptability with businesses as well. The use of its online applications seems to be growing as broadband penetration grows. If ever there was a time to resist any attempt to intrude on this world and cause customers to lose confidence, this was it. Imagine if the emails or documents of any of the niche companies in England's Silicon Valley (near Cambridge) were to be compromised by a hacker, particularly when a lot of these companies do a lot of secret work for the MoD.

Second, there is now a groundswell of opinion that China profits from the West but behaves as a predatory mercantilist, and not as a part of the evolving consensus. The Chinese approach to most things is to remind the world of Napoleon's aphorism of the sleeping giant, and to tell the world to conform or else. I will not go into recent events relating to Copenhagen, or the propping up of abhorrent regimes in the Third World in exchange for resources. The young people who run Google are aware of this, and know that to stand up to China is good press. Obviously they have done the math and know that Baidu will continue to grow even as the internet develops a strong Putonghua presence. This is the time to earn a few brownie points.

Third, I believe that the internet is developing away from the principles that informed its inception in the free-spirited University system in the United States. Google and indeed the West is losing the battle to preserve the internet as it was. I believe nothing stiffens the back as much as having a few billion bucks($30bn in near-cash securities, to be precise) jingling in your pockets. It is called FU Money. Google has it in spades, and this would have convinced them that they have nothing to lose.

I am of the opinion that Google may pull out of China, but Chinese firms will continue to advertise in the now-free Google, adding to their already substantial search revenues. I do not believe the Chinese wil block Google. And if someone googles Tiananmen from Beijing and find instead a stirring rendition of "The East is Red" coming at them, I would advise them to enjoy the music.

A Visit to Bombay House

It is an old building in the heart of Fort – in what used to be at the centre of the commercial hub of the British Empire in India and close to the port and naval installations. For those of us who started our careers in corporate India twenty odd years ago, this was the Mecca of Indian Corporate life. Close to it was the – then – brash and upstart high rises of Nariman Point. Adjacent were the old buildings of Colaba and the Reclamation, standing cheek by jowl with the residential and office complexes of the Maker family.

It used to be said that you can buy anything in Fort – including a set of parents. The old Citibank used to be head-quartered in Fort, next to the Parsi eating house called Mocambo’s – where the Citibank trainee could eat for free up to a princely Rs75 per meal and the rest of us had to scrape it up from our starting salaries for a plate of Dhansak. Even now, it has an air of bustling commerce, of deals being done and of trade being concluded – even as the lifeblood of Indian commerce moves out to new power centres like Bangalore and Gurgaon. Bombay is now Mumbai, and most companies have moved or are moving to Bandra Kurla Complex, or Kalina or Vashi or further beyond. Even the Tatas are no longer the economic powerhouse of Mumbai. The brash Ambani brothers occupy that position now, even as their personal feud takes the headlines in the gossip columns.

I am no longer as spry as I once was, and I would be the first to say that I am more old codger than young lion. However, a very senior member of the Tata management invited me to meet him. When my car stopped outside Bombay House I was surprised to find myself thrilled. Twenty five years ago, I would have been awed and humbled at the prospect of stepping into this hallowed building, to meet a member of the Tata elite, or perhaps spend a few minutes in the company of JRD himself, perhaps as part of the initiation rites of welcoming a new manager to the Tata fold. No such luck then, and nothing of that sort now. It was a business meeting, but it still left me quite honoured.

The entrance to Bombay House now looks like that of any portal to an important building – the ubiquitous metal detectors, the omnipresent security guards who check your belongings, and the clear injunction to get your registered and wait for someone to fetch you by name. Once you are inside, the atmosphere takes a giant step back almost half a century. There are the obvious nods to modernity in the form of doors activated by your visitor pass, the computers and modern telephones strewn around, the trill of the cellphone breaking the silence, and the presence of the odd young executive hurrying to answer a summons.

Other than that, it is an ambience that seems comfortable with the present while basking in the glories of its past. Nothing is flashy or glitzy, and there seems to be an effort to convey an impression of middle-class virtue rather than impress with the immense wealth the group controls. As the gentleman who I met and conversed with for over an hour told me, it is a culture of trusteeship. It is not a place to come and get fabulously wealthy, it is one that puts its trust in people, carefully selected to reflect values as much as possess skills, and leave them to generate wealth for the shareholder.

At the same time, there is an underlying sense that this is not some old cruise liner, this is a warship that can act ruthlessly when needed. I applauded Ratan Tata when he called the awful Mamata Banerjee’s bluff, and moved the Nano plant a thousand miles away. She did not think Tata would leave West Bengal, but the speed and the ruthlessness of his response left her speechless.

I sat in the waiting area, after my meeting was over, and contemplated all this. I felt a lot of affection for the old lady, and was glad that I got an opportunity to visit this landmark and spend some time with one of the very ordinary Indians who became someone notable thanks to the ability of the Tatas to trust and develop people. For a fleeting moment, I felt touched by the same greatness. Then I stepped out of the building and lost myself in the bustle of Bombay.

If this is all what Tamil Nadu can do...

I just got back to England after nearly a month in India interspersed with visits to the UAE on work. It was wonderful to be in the land of one's birth, enjoying the blessings of good food, good company and sunshine. However there were a few observations on public life in India that I could not keep from intruding on the good times..

Tamil Nadu is blessed with an alert population of literate people, who have had the benefit of some fairly advanced social movements over the last century. The infrastructure is reasonably good - ask anyone about roads in Tamil Nadu versus those in Karnataka. There are a wealth of good institutions of higher learning. In primary education, the far-sighted "noon meal scheme" of former movie star-turned-politician MGR brought many children to school. All in all, it has all the ingredients for producing much higher growth than it does today.

Yet I am appalled at how the politics of posturing and populism rules unchallenged. Caste-based politics are rife. The ruling party is neatly parcelled into interests lead by the children of the much-married octogenarian Chief Minister. The CM himself can lay claims to his literary merits and his role in using the film media to drive a message of social change as his contributions to Indian public life - he can still be a mesmerising public speaker in Tamil as Vajpayee used to be in Hindi. But his offspring are like the second generation anywhere. Blessed with the name of the Georgian leader of the Soviet Union - why, God alone knows - the heir apparent revels in populist measures that will definitely bankrupt the State. Free Colour TVs for all. Free clothes for all. Free rice for all.

Not that a responsible opposition is waiting in the wings. The former film star turned former Chief Minister has made it a point not to attend the state legislature. Instead of focussing on building a credible opposition movement based on real issues of governance, she sulks, biding her time and waiting for the world to come fall at her feet and anoint her as the next leader. Apart from the noise that usually passes for debate in the Legislature, there is no credible challenge to the government.

This is a state that has produced Nobel Laureates, economists, national level politicians, musicians, artists, sportsmen and sportswomen, writers and educators - and whose people are often held up as intellectuals in the rest of the country. Yet this is the kind of people they elect. Why talk about the antics of Mayawati or those of the former CM of Jharkhand. If this land of Tamils can only elect a lot like what inhabit the MLA hostel in Tamil Nadu, what hope do the lesser-endowed states have?

Jaswant Singh and M A Jinnah

There has been an enormous kerfuffle in India over the new book by Jaswant Singh on the life of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, and sometime barrister, man of the world and supreme constitutionalist. The book alleges that Patel and Nehru are equally - if not more - to blame for Partition in 1947 which created the states of India and Pakistan, and laid the foundations for Bangladesh, out of British India. Jaswant Singh has been expelled from the Hindu nationalist BJP. His book has been banned in Gujarat - I have no polite words for Narendra Modi and his administration - and a few other states are planning to follow suit.

Jaswant’s thesis is not new, neither do I think he is a great historian. However, he does deserve kudos for daring to speak against received wisdom in India. In historical circles, the role of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Jinnah in India’s partition is very well known and well documented. I would ask you to read Stanley Wolpert’s “Shameful Flight”. The title of the book comes from a speech by Churchill in Parliament in March 1947. By then in opposition, this was a phrase he used in an emotional speech decrying the haste with which the Mountbatten plan required the British to partition India and leave. Even as an unreconstructed Empire-apologist and a near-racist, he was accurate in predicting the bloodbath and the chaos that would follow. But I digress. Wolpert traces the evolution of the Partition plan. Once the 1946 Interim Government was in place, Patel and Nehru had a taste of what power felt like. They were not willing to delay Independence, perhaps conscious of their own mortality. So was Jinnah. On the other hand, Gandhi proposed the Confederacy with Jinnah as Prime Minister, which was rejected outright by Nehru. Gandhi’s view was that Jinnah’s extremism would be tempered once he had the reins of administration in his hands. He may well have been right. But he proposed this structure knowing fully well that Partition meant a bloodbath, a sore that would fester for years and years. As it indeed has done, with frequent wars between India and Pakistan, the rise of Islamic terrorism in India, the emergence of a virulent Hindu nationalism in India, the nuclear weapon, and so on.

Gandhi is a cliche in India - however I would recommend very highly Rajmohan Gandhi’s biography of his grandfather to help the modern Indian understand who we are talking about when they see his smiling visage on a 500 Rupee currency note. The book is very honest and it is by no means a hagiography of a famous man. Gandhi's many failings as a human being are faithfully exposed. However, the detailed account of the way the Patition Plan was accepted by Patel and Nehru makes for very sad reading. Rajmohan pieces together events over a couple of days in June 1947, in sequence, from various sources, such as the diaries of Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the diaries of Maulana Azad, the memoirs of Leo Amery, etc. In that short period, everything was done and agreed, starting with an encounter in a car at Gol Market reminiscent of a John Le Carre thriller. And then when the Mahatma comes to the Working Committee meeting to talk again about the confederacy idea, he realises that a deal has been done. Azad then asks, “Is it necessary to detain the Mahatma any more?”. No answer from Patel or Nehru. Gandhiji gets up and walks off, knowing that India has been split. An extremely poignant recounting.

Both books moved me. I remember reading the last 100 pages of Wolpert flying from Delhi to Madras in February 2008. And when I put down the book on Gandhi I had tears in my eyes. Now, whenever I listen to “Vaishnav Jan To” – indeed when I write the name of this song – I have strong feelings rise in me. What a great life, what a great soul. With all his imperfections and quirks and idiosyncrasies, he lived a great life of conviction and courage. We as Indians should be doubly proud.

Which brings me back to Jaswant. While I have a lot of appreciation for his formidable strengths as a human being and as a politician, it is a bit rich, for someone who flirted with Hindutva and was silent during the Godhra/Gujarat incidents to now talk about Mahatma Gandhi or Nehru or Patel. He does not have half the courage of a Gandhi or a Nehru. Now that he is in the evening of his political life, may be this is a confession of sorts. I don’t know. Epiphanies are always welcome whenever they arrive. So one should be grateful, I suppose

The Worli Sea Link

I am in Mumbai, and I had an opportunity to travel on the new Worli Sea Link that connects the Bandra coast to Haji Ali (apologies to those not familiar with Mumbai). It is a remarkable piece of engineering, with a beautiful suspension bridge right in the middle. If ever any one wants to see the power of thought and the rule of physical law (that is mathematics and physics) you have to see a suspension bridge. The entire section of road is held by metal stays that are suspended from two or more concrete supports at each end. This is the stuff of real life that changes lives. Recently, driving back from Normandy to Calais from Carentan, I took the A13 which crosses the Pont du Normandie - another magnificent piece of work. Also a suspension bridge, and also a solution to what could have been - literally - an insurmountable engineering problem. The Pont du Gard at Nimes should be in this list. It crosses the river Rhone, and is an aqueduct built by the Romans around the 1st century AD. They built well. A few years ago there were severe floods in the region, and the Pont du Gard was one of the few structures to stay intact.

We in India need to learn the art of building once and building well. A project like the Sea Link defines the ambitions of a nation. Do we want to be a civilisation that shapes the earth for the good of those who live on it today and for eternity. And I do not mean yet another shopping mall. Do we believe in the future? When we build without engineering foresight and proper planning, we are telling our children that we did not believe that they would come to exist. It states that we do not believe in posterity. That our generation lacked ambition. We did not believe in ourselves enough to think that we would be capable of handing down a patrimony. I could show all the projects that we have undertaken that have not stood the test of time. The Mandovi bridge. The Bhakra Nangal dam that develops cracks. The thousands of miles of shoddy roads. Ask these planners to take a trip to Volubilis in Morocco or to Libya or Tunisia to see the Roman roads, still there, and sometimes capable of taking 4x4 traffic.

The Worli Sealink bypasses Mahim, which as any Bombayite knows, is an olfactory delight for anyone passing through it. However it also bypasses the Lady Jamshedji Road (the main road that connects Bandra to Dadar). This road - also known as the Mahim Causeway - was built in 1856 or so by Lady Jamshedji. She built it at a cost of Rupees One Hundred Thousand, and gave it to the city. Earlier, traders had to load up boats at Bandra and cross over to the other side. Now, they had a road. The impact on commerce and on the growth of this astonishing city was phenomenal. It is hard to quantify the magnitude of the generosity in today's money. But it never hurts to remember what happens if you build once, build well, and build for the future.

I came across a letter in the FT, (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9ce6a3d2-8159-11de-92e7-00144feabdc0.html) deriding India's efforts to try and stem the decline of the Himalayan glaciers in association with China. Now, we are talking about two countries that are villains in Western eyes, for refusing to toe the line on emission cuts. And now they get together to try and save the glaciers without first cutting emissions. This German academic, no doubt echoing the Indian rope trick, asked about the "Indians magic tricks to rescue the world from global warming".

The “magic trick” that India needs to continue to pull – as she has done with some success – is to provide a degree of economic development to its teeming millions, guaranteeing them a chance at living a small part of the middle class life that I am sure Prof Sendler enjoys in ample measure. And she has to do this while making sure her borders are safe, her democracy and civil liberties are reasonably secure, her various communities strive to find common cause rather than yield to those who exploit differences, her forest and natural wealth are preserved – I could go on.

Mr Jairam Ramesh, the Indian minister who flatly refused to entertain the notion of unilateral emission cuts recently, is not a stupid or unreasonable man, and I am sure he reads the same literature as Prof Sendler. If the current path of economic development that India is on were to be arrested because India yields to concerns about emission control, the result would be social and economic chaos which I am sure the West will do very little to solve. If there is an alternate path, let it present itself. Until then, India has no choice.

If Prof Sendler would care to review the same evidence, he would perhaps realise that his country is the third largest polluter per capita in the world in terms of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere (Cf David Mackay, “Without the Hot Air”). The Indian position is not a simple one – this is because India’s development problem is not something that can be simplified. It needs to be understood, and I would urge Prof Sendler to do just that.

Having said all this, it is high time India and China collaborated on how to make their economies greener, and establish intellectual leadership in technologies that enable this path. Some of them are obvious measures. I am sure there are more things that can be done.