The CPI's Emergency stumble

THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA AND THE INDIAN EMERGENCY
David Lockwood
Sage
228 pages; Rs 795

At the heart of David Lockwood's brilliant study of the Communist Party of India (CPI)'s support for the Emergency is the question: What was the nature of the Congress? For the majority of India's history, political parties have reached differing conclusions on the nature of the freedom struggle and the class interests of the Indian National Congress (INC).

In their brilliant three-volume study titled The Struggle for Hegemony in India, Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh concluded that the INC was not a monolithic party, but a movement. In this view, the Congress had a very diverse shade of opinions within it, from those supporting the free market to socialists and communists.

From its inception, the CPI grappled with this question. In fact, one of the reasons for the split in the party in 1964 were differences over the understanding of the Congress, which led to the formation of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The CPI(M) felt the Congress was a party of the national bourgeoisie on the one hand and landlords on the other.

However, the CPI, though opposed to the nascent Indian state, saw in the second five-year plan the beginnings of a tilt towards socialism. As a result, its relationship with the Congress changed to one of "unity and struggle."

Mr Lockwood documents how this changed with Jawaharlal Nehru's death. The Lal Bahadur Shastri government sought to liberalise the economy. Even Indira Gandhi continued on this path. In 1966, she said: "We have weeded out some controls and we will always be ready to eliminate those that outlive their utility."

Opposition to this came not just from the communists, but also, surprisingly, from big business houses, according to Mr Lockwood. However, regulation of the economy was reintroduced from 1968 onwards and the Congress moved to the left, because of electoral reverses in 1967, where the might of the Congress was challenged for the first time. This leftward tilt became more pronounced with the split in the Congress in 1969.

The CPI felt vindicated with the Congress' turn to the left. It now tried to make common cause with the left wing of the Congress, which seemed to have the backing of Mrs Gandhi herself.

According to the book, when the JP movement emerged, so called because it was headed by freedom fighter Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), the CPI was opposed to it as it felt this was a reaction against the leftist turn in the economy. While the movement elicited some support from the bourgeoisie in the beginning, Mr Lockwood notes, with the promise of further "chaos" in the following year, they decided to support the government instead.

The other problem the CPI had with the movement was the participation of what it saw as "fascist forces." These were the Jana Sangh (JS) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), both of which played a crucial role in mobilising support for the movement. JP's statement that "if the Jan Sangh is fascist, then I too am fascist," cleared any lingering doubts in the CPI, according to Mr Lockwood.

When the Emergency was declared, the CPI initially supported it with few reservations. It believed in the government's 20-point programme, and concentrated its efforts on mobilising people to try and make the government implement the programme.

Yet, by 1976 things had begun to change. The CPI was uneasy about the repression of political opponents, and was up in arms over the lack of interest in the Congress in implementing the 20-point programme.

However, the support of the Emergency cost the CPI dearly in the elections of 1977. A theoretical debate raged within the party, and support for the Emergency was criticised. The party also took a critical view of its relationship with the Congress.

For this reason, this book seems all the more timely as reports filter in about Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union President Kanhaiya Kumar's meeting with Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi. Mr Kumar, a member of CPI-affiliated All India Students Federation, called for Left unity in his rousing speech the day he was released from custody after he was charged with sedition. That unity seems unlikely, however, if the CPI cosies up to the Congress now. If anything, this book highlights the limits any such move can have. Any attempts to differentiate between the communalism of the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party will inevitably bring to the surface the inherent differences between the Left parties.

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The CPI's Emergency stumble

Indian soldiers in the Great War

FOR KING AND ANOTHER COUNTRY
Shrabani Basu
Bloomsbury India
442 pages; Rs 599

One of the best-known war poets of English Literature, Wilfred Owen died in the trenches, aged 25, seven days before World War I ended. The lines of poetry that he carried in his notebook during the war were "When I go from hence, let this be my parting word, that what I have seen is unsurpassable" from Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali.

Shrabani Basu in her book For King and Another Country talks about how this fact often moved her. It was, however, much later that she realised that there was a deeper connection to India in World War I.

While the names of Indian soldiers who died fighting in World War I is commemorated on the India Gate, few in India know about the lives of these soldiers who crossed the Kala Pani for the first time, to die in foreign fields. Ms Basu notes, "There were Indians too fighting in those same trenches, shoulder to shoulder with their 'Sahibs' with unquestioning loyalty."

The Indian contribution to World War I cannot be underestimated. By the end of the war, nearly one and a half million Indians (including combatants and non-combatants) had gone to the frontline. Indians comprised the largest volunteer army from any of the colonies (even larger than the combined armies from Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland). By the end of the war, the dead and missing were almost 72,000, and many more were wounded and disabled.

Ms Basu explains what participation in the War meant for the different parties involved. For Britain, taking the Indian Army to war would send out a powerful message to the world. To its allies, France and Russia, it would portray the solidarity between Britain and its largest colony. To the Germans, the message would be that a large naval power could call upon the military might of its global empire. To the Indian political class, loyalty to the British Empire could gain "brownie points" in future negotiations for autonomy and eventual self-rule. To the soldiers, it was a chance to go to vilayat.

The book brings the war to life through six soldiers, three Maharajas, two airmen and a cleaner. Ms Basu details the roles of some of the British viceroys, generals, members of the Cabinet among others. Using the thousands of letters soldiers wrote home, Ms Basu notes their despair, anxiety and loyalty to the King and the British Empire. She also expounds on the camaraderie and racism they faced while fighting Britain's battles.

The book highlights fascinating facts about the logistics of the war - how Indian soldiers were looked after and their needs met by different sources. Comfort food items to cope in the trenches such as boiled sweets, gud, papad, and pickle often made their way. Coconut oil for the their hair was sourced from India. Copies of the Guru Granth Sahib for the Sikhs, and the miniature Quran (Pansuras) for Muslims were sent across. Establishing separate kitchens for Hindus and Muslims created a "logistical nightmare" for the British. Often orderlies were killed in crossfire while transporting food to the trenches. Ms Basu depicts how the Indian caste system seeped into the European battlefields, as an untouchable cleaner Sukha died of pneumonia in 1915, and neither the Muslim nor Hindu soldiers stepped up for his funeral. Finally, a church in Brockenhurst offered a space in the graveyard. "It tells a lot about our social system," Ms Basu concludes.

Letters Indian soldiers wrote home were first submitted to British censorship authorities. The outgoing letters were censored to ensure they did not contain information about the war, or portray English society in a negative view, which could impact future recruitment. So the Indians formed their own code, using "red pepper" to refer to the British and "black pepper" for Indian soldiers. The censors soon identified these codes and would come to understand the mood troops based on them. Newspapers such as Ghadar, Bande Mataram and The Indian Sociologist had to be confiscated before they instigated mutiny.

The book concludes with the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, which took place barely five months after the war. 400,000 people from Punjab had fought in the war, and this massacre was seen as "a cruel reward for their loyalty." Ms Basu looks at this incident through the eyes of one of the most prominent airmen of the War, Hardit Singh Malik. "Malik who had so proudly flown his Sopwith Camel aircraft over Belgium and France, risking his life for the allies, watched in horror as his colleagues from the RAF pounded his homeland with bombs killing innocent civilians." This was among the first time air power was used against non-combatants.

As seen in her previous books, Victoria and Abdul and A Spy Princess, Ms Basu has a knack for picking esoteric slices of history that are not adequately explored. At a time when nationality and nationalism are topics of debate, and history finds itself often divorced from facts and in the hands of interpretation, Ms. Basu's book adds a nuanced understanding of the Indian identity before independence. The books unwraps concepts of loyalty, patriotism, nationhood and analyses the motivations of the Indians for participating and dying in a foreign war.

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Indian soldiers in the Great War

British national clicks selfie with EgyptAir hijacker | A look at some bizarre selfies

British national Ben Innes' selfie with the hijacker onboard an EgyptAir flight took the internet by storm on Tuesday. What Innes described as the "best selfie ever" divided social media opinion, with some calling it an act of stupidity, while others hailed it as bravery on his part.
Regardless, the selfie proves that people never lose a chance to click themselves at the most opportune moments. 
Ben Innes, 26, was one of the last four passengers who were held hostage by hijacker Seif Eldin Mustafa at Larnaca airport in Cyprus. Justifying his move, Innes claimed that he wanted to take a closer look at the explosives belt to identify whether it was real.  Read more from our special coverage on "EGYPTAIR"EgyptAir hijacker arrested; all hostages free
“I’m not sure why I did it, I just threw caution to the wind while trying to stay cheerful in the face of adversity. I figured if his bomb was real I’d nothing to lose anyway, so took a chance to get a closer look at it. I got one of the cabin crew to translate for me and asked him if I could do a selfie with him. He just shrugged OK, so I stood by him and smiled for the camera while a stewardess did the snap. It has to be the best selfie ever,” Innes was quoted as saying in media reports.
Luckily for Innes and the other hostages, the bomb was later deemed to be fake, but one wrong move on his part could have cost them all their lives if it had been real. 
While this can certainly qualify for one of the most bizarre selfies, social media has often shown us multiple examples of a 'selfie-crazy' population that makes one question their common sense and sensitivity. 
Here are a few examples:Image tweeted by @iShewaani

A Sri Lankan man posted a selfie on his Facebook account, taken next to his dead uncle.

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British national clicks selfie with EgyptAir hijacker | A look at some bizarre selfies

Future shocks: the algorithm is out there

THE INDUSTRIES OF THE FUTURE
Alec Ross
Simon & Schuster
320 pages; Rs 1,364

Alec Ross, distinguished visiting fellow at Johns Hopkins and an expert on innovation, provides an array of exciting facts "for those who would be interested to know how the next wave of innovation and globalisation will affect our society and ourselves". During the 1,445 days he served as Senior Advisor for Innovation to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his job was "to bring innovation mojo to a tradition-bound State Department'. He travelled 500,000 miles and spoke to innumerable people in several countries.

Exploring which industries might drive the next 20 years of change to our economy, Mr Ross says they are robotics, genetics, data, the code-ification of money and defence. His last chapter concedes that the most important job anyone has is that of being a parent, so how best can we prepare the next generation?

For sure the El Dorado will lie at the intersection of information technology and biology. Will artificial intelligence advance to AGI (artificial general intelligence)? If it does then human intelligence would have been exceeded, a point called a "singularity" by American author Ray Kurzweil. However one must note that AI itself has died about four times in the last five decades - too much hype, according to some experts.

On the flip side, others feel AGI is not far away and we could experience Mr Kurzweil's prediction of the "rupture in the fabric of history". Mr Ross reveals his predilection by writing about robots for human tasks, which involve "situational awareness, spatial reasoning, dexterity, contextual understanding and judgment".

The economic value of robotics, genetics and AI is no longer in doubt. Writer David Gilbert recently reported in the International Business Times that IBM's Watson, which five years ago beat a human in Jeopardy, is "now set to provide IBM a huge future engine".

Mr Ross points out that car accidents are caused by 4 Ds: distraction, drowsiness, drunkenness and driver error. Google's self-driving cars have already driven two million miles with only 11 minor accidents, all caused by human error. "We accept 1 million road deaths per year but will cavil at a few hundred thousand accidents through driverless cars," Mr Ross rightly observes.

In the powerful chapter on genetics, Mr Ross quotes the example of the gene, ACP1, which produces a protein that has been found to be excessive among those people contemplating suicide. Trials are being developed to produce a pill that can be administered to those contemplating suicide. Gosh!

A second example is a controversial start-up, 23andMe. It offers anyone a testing kit with which predictive analysis of genetic health risks can be done.

A third example is "xenotransplantation," which means modifying a pig genome so that a pig embryo can grow up with organs that can be harvested and transplanted into humans. Considering the human body has 25,000 genes, 640 muscles, 206 bones and 78 organs, the future market for pigs appears to be explosive!

Such developments will inevitably raise complex questions of ethics and psychology. This is where a philosophy of science steps in, because advances will be limited by what humans learn to do with them. Trust, security and singularity need not slow down such technologies going mainstream. As eBay founder, Pierre Omidyar, says, "a new form of algorithm-generated trust" is already developed. It allows people who don't know each other to transact business because the intermediary is trusted, for example, AirbNb and Bitcoin.

However, Mr Ross has his focus on learning and culture, not on inequality and unemployment. According to Martin Ford, author of The Rise of the Robots, "relentless technology advancement will drive us towards greater inequality and rising unemployment."

It is good to recall the pessimism when we faced similar questions in the last century. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes had predicted that "electrification and internal combustion engines would lead to an increase in material prosperity but also technological unemployment." In 1964, a group of scientists and sociologists reported to US President Lyndon Johnson that "cybernation results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which will require less and less human labour."

Northwestern University Professor Robert Gordon counts as the most persuasive pessimist about exaggerated forecasts of technology. He considers human well-being to be the real test of technological change. According to his book, The Rise and the Fall of American Growth, "the period 1870-1970 was a special century when electricity, flush toilets, cars, planes, radio, vaccines, clean water, antibiotics, all transformed living and working conditions in a way that no other 100 year period in world history has." In comparison he feels computers and internet generate marginal improvements. (I can't help observing that the same period brought two catastrophic world wars, climate change and severe water depletion.)

A person like me is certainty deeply curious about what the world will be like in 2045. Mr Ross has written a book well worth the reader's money and time. My intuition is represented by Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs. "Something is clearly happening here, but we don't know what it means. And by the time we do, we may well have been replaced by algorithms, like everybody else."

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Future shocks: the algorithm is out there

Nilanjana S Roy: Letting go

As a species, we suck at handling death. Except for a few evolved souls and practising Tibetan Buddhists, the rest of humanity hurtles towards the one part of their lives that is inevitable and unavoidable with a blend of screaming fear and absolute denial.

Atul Gawande wrote about this movingly in Being Mortal, reflecting that though modern medicine had changed people's life expectancies and the arc of ageing, we had lost the art of dying well. "Dying used to be accompanied by a prescribed set of customs," he wrote. "Guides to ars moriendi, the art of dying, were extraordinarily popular; a 1415 medieval Latin text was reprinted in more than a hundred editions across Europe."

Read more from our special coverage on "SPEAKING VOLUMES"Nilanjana S Roy: 50 lives, 2,500 years

But most people are uncomfortable thinking about the prospect of their own deaths. It is hard enough to fully accept your mortality, harder still to accept that you have no control over how or when you will die. Given how much effort most humans put into controlling every other aspect of their lives - their work, their homes, whom they choose to live with or befriend, their diets, even their hair colouring - this is the deal-breaker, the thing that makes us unable to talk about death with the same curiosity and openness that we bring to other phases of our lives.

The few who can face death with calm acceptance are heroes. But to face death bravely is one thing. To be able to write about the imminence of dying, to place your life and your life's joys and challenges in perspective when you are gripped by an illness that takes the decades you had planned for and cuts them down to months - that is an act of transcendent courage and humanity.

This is what Paul Kalanithi accomplished in When Breath Becomes Air, a memoir published posthumously after his untimely death at the age of 37 from cancer. Kalanithi was a practising neurosurgeon, and is survived by his wife, Lucy, and daughter. Lucy compiled his writings, letters and articulate posts from internet forums, and contributed one of the most moving epilogues in memory to this book.

Kalanithi grew up in Arizona, where he read books given to him by his mother, from Thoreau to Sartre. This early reading may have shaped his style - lucid, but also classically beautiful, a surgeon's neatness married to a writer's imagination - and explains his love of poetry. He took his title from a poem, Caelica 83, by Baron Brooke Fulke Greville: "You that seek what life is in death/ Now find it in air that once was breath/ New names unknown, old ones gone/ Till time ends bodies, but souls none."

The impression you get of Kalanithi is of a man of driving intelligence, quick humour and compassion, who scorched the earth with his determination to do and know as much as he could. He had acquired two BAs and an MA in literature at Stanford as well as a Master of Philosophy at Cambridge, before he joined the Yale School of Medicine. At Stanford, he became a surgeon and pursued a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience.

He had already accomplished so much in his life, and planned for so much more, when the first signs of cancer intruded: pain in his lower back, weight loss, fatigue.

One of the most poignant passages in When Breath Becomes Air is an account of his last day at work as a practising surgeon. His immersion in his work, his care with the patients whose ailments he succours as he cuts into their bodies, sutures incisions, patiently repairs an assisting surgeon's inadvertent blunder, is so evident. The joy he took in being a healer is obvious, and so painfully touching, as he crosses the bridge that takes him from being a doctor to being a patient himself.

It astonishes me to think that he set down the chapters with such a steady mind, recording his life before and after his cancer diagnosis with honesty and clarity. There are moments of bittersweet joy: "Our daughter was born days after I was released from the hospital. Week to week, she blossoms: a first grasp, a first smile, a first laugh. Her pediatrician regularly records her growth on charts, tick marks of her progress over time. A brightening newness surrounds her. As she sits in my lap smiling, enthralled by my tuneless singing, an incandescence lights the room."

And of unflinching wisdom. "Every day brings me further from the low of my last cancer relapse, but every day also brings me closer to the next cancer recurrence - and eventually, death." People might respond in two ways to such a diagnosis, he writes: one would be an impulse to frantic activity, to achieve a host of neglected ambitions. But cancer limits his energy as well as his time: "I plod, I ponder, some days I simply persist."

"I got to know Paul only after his death. I came to know him most intimately when he'd ceased to be," Abraham Verghese writes in the foreword. Many readers will know Paul only posthumously, too, and will feel the loss of not having known this vibrant, self-aware, wry, wise man when he was alive. I thought of Oliver Sacks, and what he wrote when he faced death: "I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return."

When Breath Becomes Air, written by a dying man about his condition, is one of the most life-affirming books I have read in a while. Kalanithi gave so much in return to the world where he lived so richly as surgeon, husband, father, writer.

Email: nilanjanasroy@gmail.com

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Kohli hits out at people for trolling Anushka

Team India ace cricketer Virat Kohli on Monday lashed out at social media trolls for targetting Bollywood actor Anushka Sharma, saying that those who blame her for anything negative in his cricket career should be ashamed of themselves.

Kohli, who single-handedly powered India into the World Twenty20 semifinal with a hurricane 82-run knock against Australia last night, took to Twitter and Instagram to hit out at the trolls who take digs at his former girlfriend after every India match.

For all those people who have been cringing every time people trolled his former girlfriend Anushka Sharma when India won a match during World T20 championship, Kohli has just one word: Shame

"Shame on those people who have been having a go at anushka for the longest time and connecting every negative thing to her. Shame on those people calling themselves educated," Kohli wrote.

"Shame on blaming and making fun of her when she has no control over what i do with my sport. If anything she has only motivated and given me more positivity. This was long time coming. Shame on these people that hide and take a dig.

Shame on people for trolling @AnushkaSharma non-stop. Have some compassion. She has always only given me positivity http://pic.twitter.com/OBIMA2EZKu— Virat Kohli (@imVkohli) March 28, 2016"And i dont need any respect for this post. Have some compassion and respect her. Think of how your sister or girlfriend or wife would feel if someone trolled them and very conveniently rubbished them in public," he added.

Sharma has been subjected to trolling in the past as well, most notably after Kohli flopped in the ODI World Cup semifinal against Australia last year.

While Kohli and Anushka never commented on their relationship, it became public when they were spotted together on work trips. This is not the first time the Bollywood actor was connected to Kohli's performance. 
In 2014, Kohli's poor on-field performance against England had fans attacking Anushka. The lowest point came when Anushka was blamed for Kohli's blip during 2015 World Cup against the mighty Australians. 
The ace cricketer had come to the Bollywood diva defence even then.
Meanwhile, the star couple had called off their relationship early this year, when they unfollowed each other on social media. But, they are yet to comment on their breakup.

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Kohli hits out at people for trolling Anushka

Amitabh Bachchan, Kangana win Best Actor National Awards for Piku, Tanu Weds Manu Returns

Amitabh Bachchan and Kangana Ranaut have won the 2015 National Award for Best Actor and Actress, respectively, for their roles in Piku and Tanu Weds Manu Returns.
 
The awards, which were announced Monday, also named Sanjay Leela Bhansali as Best Director for his opulently mounted Bajirao Mastani, while the mythological action drama Bahubali won as Best Film.
 
Yash Raj Film’s Dum Laga ke Haisha, directed by Sharad Katariya and starring Ayushmann Khurana, won best Hindi film.
 
Juhi Chaturvedi for Piku and Himanshu Sharma for Tanu Weds Manu Returns won two National Awards apiece for Best Original Screenplay and Best Screenplay (Dialogues).
 
The Kabir Khan-directed Salman Khan starrer Bajrangi Bhaijaan, in which Khan plays a vegetarian Hindu who battles the odds to get a lost Pakistani girl across the border back to her family, won for the weightily-titled Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment
 
This the fourth National Award for Bachchan, who is enjoying a remarkable second innings as an actor after first making his mark as an iconic Angry Young Man in the ‘70s and quickly rising to being one of India’s top actors. After a brief stint as a producer via ABCL that went horribly wrong, Bachchan has made a comeback with a wide range of roles, some of which appeal to the popular sections of the box-office, while others have garnered praise from critics and more serious cinema goers.
 
He has earlier won for Agneepath, in which he plays a criminal don out for revenge; Black, in which he plays a former alcoholic who tutors a blind deaf-mute; and for Paa, in which plays a child who ages rapidly because of pregeria, a rare genetic disorder. 

Sudeep Chaterjee won Best Cinematographer for Bajirao Mastani, while veteran music director Illaiyaraaja won the National Award for best Music Direction (Background score) for his work in Thaarai Thapattai

Late Kishore T E won the Best Editing award for Visaranai. Duronto took home the honours for Best Children's film. 

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Amitabh Bachchan, Kangana win Best Actor National Awards for Piku, Tanu Weds Manu Returns

National film awards: Gujarat named Most Film-Friendly State

Gujarat was on Monday named the Most Film-Friendly State at the 63rd National Film Awards here.Senthil Rajan, director, Directorate of Film Festivals, announced the award at the National Media Centre here.This is the first time that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has bestowed this award in order to promote film tourism in states."We had 16 entries from different states, and this is a major step by the Indian government to promote film tourism in the states because this sort of an award will enthuse the states."We chose Gujarat primarily because of the efforts in the direction of ease of doing business and facilitation of films and towards the promotion of Indian cinema," Rajan said.A special mention was also given to Uttar Pradesh for its single window clearance efforts and incentives offered by the government, and to Kerala.Apart from Rajan, the jury for choosing the Most Film-Friendly State were Sudhir Mishra, Bharat Bala and Pravesh Sahani.

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Is Virat Kohli a better cricketer than Sachin Tendulkar?

By the time India's pivotal ICC World T20 game against Pakistan at Kolkata's Eden Gardens ended exactly a week ago, Virat Kohli had single-handedly taken his team home. He culled out 55 beautiful runs, as he drove, flicked and cut with practised ease.

At one stage of the match, India's chances looked slim with three of its top-order batsmen back in the pavilion. Shikhar Dhawan and Suresh Raina had been consumed off consecutive balls by the furious pace of Mohammad Sami. The Pakistani pacers, led by the crafty Mohammad Amir, looked eager to avenge their defeat at the Asia Cup in Dhaka on February 27. The exit door for the Indian team had been well and truly unlatched. This was destined to end in calamity. Then, Kohli, like great men do in moments of crisis, took charge.

After reaching his half-century, Kohli languidly raised his bat, walked up to Mahendra Singh Dhoni for a gentle embrace, and, almost belatedly, bowed down to someone in the crowd. Some 100 metres away, Sachin Tendulkar stood up in the aisles, furiously waving the Tricolour, his joy encapsulated in an incandescent smile.

This was Kohli's veneration for his master: the man who had inspired him to pick up a cricket bat in the first place, the man he had grown up watching. Just that now, he was exactly like him, or, dare it be suggested, maybe a shade better while chasing down daunting totals?

Somewhere in the middle of the Indian chase at Eden Gardens, the inevitability of a Kohli masterclass had become apparent; an unwavering certitude that comes with very few players.

The same faith that has won India innumerable limited-overs matches in the last few years, the same conviction that slayed a hapless Pakistan in the 2012 Asia Cup. Coming in with nothing on the board, Kohli blazed his way to a 148-ball 183, helping his team chase down an improbable 330. Against Sri Lanka at Ranchi in 2014, Kohli scored 139 after India had lost four wickets for a little more than a hundred in pursuit of the islanders' 286. His dogged 49 on a lively track against Pakistan in Dhaka last month was another confirmation of his genius.

For most, Tendulkar is a sacrosanct, almost untouchable figure; a player whose greatness transcended generations, whose achievements with the bat many feel will forever remain impregnable. It may well turn out to be that way. But Kohli, at least for now, threatens to throw that into disarray.

Syed Kirmani, India's 1983 World Cup-winning wicket-keeper, says Tendulkar and Kohli are from two different eras and there comparison in terms of impact wouldn't be fair but acknowledges that "Kohli is well on his way to getting there".

The 1990s saw the emergence of Tendulkar as India's greatest match-winner. He was so often India's sole warrior, separating his side from victory and defeat. But Tendulkar's most valiant attempts often ended in despairing defeat. Some of his finest knocks - the 143 against Shane Warne and Australia on that mystical Sharjah evening of 1998, the back-spasm-defying 136 in the Test match against Pakistan at Chepauk the following year, the whirlwind 175 against Australia in Hyderabad in 2008 - all ended in narrow losses for India.

The 1990s also gave rise to the dopey myth that India seldom won when Tendulkar scored big. Even as the cynics fervidly stuck to this theory, the pragmatists dismissed it as twaddle. In a lot of ways, that's what it was. In the 234 ODI games that Tendulkar won while playing for India, he scored 33 centuries and 59 half-centuries: stellar numbers.

Kohli's ODI numbers are, quite frankly, absurd. The 27-year-old is the fastest to 7,000 runs, bettering the mark set by Tendulkar by 28 innings. He has 15 hundreds in chases (out of his 25), as compared to Tendulkar's 17 (total: 49). The caveat is that Kohli's 15 have come in 91 outings, while Tendulkar took 232 matches to get his 17 tons. But then bats have got bigger, the grounds tinier and the game has tilted in favour of the batsman more than ever before.

India's 1983 World Cup-winning captain, Kapil Dev, earlier this week described Kohli as someone who is better than Vivian Richards, Ricky Ponting, Brian Lara and Tendulkar. "The more I look at him, the more I'm convinced that he's the best out there," he said.

Nayan Mongia, another former Indian wicket-keeper, refuses to draw comparisons between the two, but says that Kohli is as good as any match-winner India has seen in the last two decades. "When it comes to winning matches, he is up there with the best," says Mongia.

In October 2013, Kohli scored two blistering centuries that first spawned his comparison with Tendulkar. Against Australia, Kohli struck 100 in 52 balls - the fastest hundred by an Indian in ODI cricket - at Jaipur, followed by 115 in Nagpur exactly two weeks later. India chased down scores in excess of 350 in both the games.

For this generation, these two knocks were the equivalent of what Tendulkar had done at Sharjah 15 years earlier. The same grace, power and poise: qualities that when put into full effect give captains and bowlers sleepless nights.

Even Kohli's bat, as Harsha Bhogle pointed out, was identical to Tendulkar's - sporting the same sticker. Kohli had arrived, and how. This was the shooting of the first scene of the making of a modern-day legend. An entire movie was to follow.

Pradeep Sangwan spent almost his entire childhood playing with Kohli. The two first became teammates while playing for the Delhi under-15 team. Sangwan has seen Kohli go from precocious talent to world-beater from close quarters. "You look at him, do you see any weaknesses? I don't. There just aren't any," he says.

Last summer, just before the World Cup, Kohli struggled against the moving ball outside his off-stump, a weakness that was brutally exposed by the likes of Mitchell Johnson and Steven Finn. "That was a problem. But he corrected that very quickly. There is no sign of that now," says Sangwan. "That's what makes him so good."

Kohli fears no one. Tendulkar struggled appallingly against James Anderson late in his career.

Another former cricketer, who agrees to speak on the condition of anonymity, says that no discernible shortcoming is what makes Kohli better than Tendulkar. "Tendulkar struggled against a particular type of bowler or opposition. You could get at him. With Kohli, he treats everybody with the same disdain. And, his self-belief is incredible."

Self-belief, which makes him withstand the pressure in crunch situations, is something ingrained deep in Kohli's persona; the "don't worry, I will get you home" kind of stuff. "He has always liked a challenge. More important, he wants to overcome that challenge. That's where he gets this self-belief from," says Rajkumar Sharma, Kohli's childhood coach.

Tendulkar, smothered by the weight of expectation, often crumbled in key situations. Two World Cup finals - 2003 and 2011 - are prime examples. In both the games, India was chasing sizeable totals and Tendulkar imploded. But then, Kohli, at this stage of his career, isn't bound by the kind of pressure that Tendulkar was subject to for maybe far too long.

Another former cricketer, on the condition of anonymity, says that Kohli's ability to manipulate the opposition and his chanceless style of batting is what sets him apart. "Once he's in, he's in. He just doesn't give you a chance. And, you can't say that about too many batsmen," he says.

True. Even AB de Villiers and Steven Smith, two of the most prolific run-scorers in the game today, always offer bowlers a window of opportunity. With Kohli, that is seldom the case; such is the assuredness that accompanies him.

Kohli's exploits on the field have helped rich returns off it. The Indian Test captain currently endorses 13 brands, including Pepsi, MRF, Audi and Tissot. His bat deal with MRF is the most lucrative among all his teammates. Comparisons with Tendulkar here too are obvious.

Kohli is quite the antithesis of his idol. Tendulkar was always grounded, soft-spoken - a piece of pre-liberalisation conservatism. Kohli, who breathes fire and hurls abuses at the opposition, unfriendly crowds included, is the new India: in your face, unapologetic and result-oriented.

Varun Gupta, managing director (India), American Appraisal, the company that every year evaluates the Indian Premier League as a brand, says that Kohli may surpass his idol in terms of pure dollar value but Tendulkar will forever remain a brand pioneer. "It's fair to say that there is more money in cricket today than 15 years ago. Since they are from different eras, Kohli may actually end up making more, but Tendulkar will forever be the ultimate benchmark," he says.

Brand expert Harish Bijoor describes Tendulkar as "brand ambassador emeritus". "Kohli, with his image of an aggressive and brash young man, can attract big brands. But competing with Tendulkar on that front is asking for maybe too much," says Bijoor.

Gupta adds that what makes Kohli so appealing is his visibility: "He comes out to bat early and stays in for long periods. Moreover, he plays all three formats."

A genius that cuts across all three formats -perhaps that's what illustrates Kohli's greatness. Twenty years ago, Tendulkar did not have to grapple with the prospect of playing three entirely different formats of cricket in a matter of days. He did not have to face the new ball on a green top in a Test match followed by the daunting task of scoring at 10 runs an over in a T20 game three days later. Kohli is faced with that very proposition every once in a while, and the results are spellbinding.

"Kohli can score against any team in any format. He is the embodiment of the modern-day batsman," says Mongia.

Tendulkar played just one T20 international. Given his penchant for decimating bowling attacks, you sometimes wish T20 cricket was introduced 10 years earlier than it actually was - when Tendulkar was at his absolute peak. He would have been the ideal fit. Maybe, God gave us Kohli to make up for that.

For someone who averages an eye-popping 52.50 in T20 internationals (in excess of 80 while chasing), Kohli is far from the swashbuckling, ball-crushing batsman that this format perennially craves. He isn't the greatest innovator either. He is just an all-round batting monster whose last shot is hit with the same earnestness as his first, the beauty in each stroke startlingly palpable.

As a complete batsman, Tendulkar had few peers; he was an immortal among mortals, someone who rewrote record books with the same easy flourish with which he wielded his willow. His numbers may forever prove to be insurmountable. But once in a while, a young man challenges the old guard, throwing down the gauntlet and then thwarting it himself.

Virat Kohli is that man. And he is just 27.

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Is Virat Kohli a better cricketer than Sachin Tendulkar?

Frenemies in the Nation of Islam

BLOOD BROTHERS
The Fatal Friendship Between Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X
Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith
Basic Books
362 pages; $28.99

There is today a thriving industry of hagiography on Muhammad Ali. It is, however, not easy to explain how the Louis­ville Lip morphed from a blarney-filled boxer into a global symbol of racial pride and self-respect. According to Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith in Blood Brothers, the chrysalis was Mr Ali's intense but tragic friendship with Malcolm X.

As early as his high school years, Cassius Clay had been intrigued by the Nation of Islam. In 1962, the heavyweight contender travelled to Detroit to listen to the Nation's "Supreme Minister," Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X.

For African-Americans, the Nation represented a militant alternative to picket lines, fire hoses and attack dogs. Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm sneered at Martin Luther King's strategy of nonviolence, supported segregation and declared that the white man was the Devil. How did this hostile-to-paranoid worldview attract the people-loving boxer who was bankrolled by a lily-white investment group?

One of the signal contributions of Blood Brothers - a rigorously researched book that gracefully pivots between the world of the ring and the racial politics of the early 1960s - is its excavation of Cassius Clay Sr's impact in shaping his son's views on race, and thereby enhancing the appeal of the Nation of Islam. Mr Roberts and Mr Smith, historians who have written sports books, explain: "Cassius Clay Sr told parables that taught young Cassius ... about the world. All the stories had the same general theme: Black men die after seemingly harmless encounters with white men."

At their first meeting, Malcolm X didn't know who Mr Clay was. But from the start, "Malcolm had magnetised Mr Clay, drawing him toward the inner circle of the Nation." Within months, the fighter and the minister who was famous for the line "by any means necessary" were orbiting each other.

Though Mr Clay's boxing brain trust feared that an association with the Nation and Malcolm would deck his chances at a title shot, the fighter was spellbound. At every opportunity, he travelled to sit at Malcolm's feet and imbibe the stirring and frequently violent rhetoric. The more time he spent with the minister, the more "Clay began thinking of himself as divine, graced by the power of Allah." When the press asked him about his influences, Mr Clay liked to say, "Who made me is me." But in many ways, Malcolm X formed the man whom all the world would come to know.

Like Mr Ali, Malcolm was a charismatic person with ardent ambitions. An ex-convict, he was devoted to Elijah Muhammad, at least until he learned that Elijah had had multiple affairs and numerous children out of wedlock, and had used the Nation's treasury as his personal checking account.

Malcolm confronted Elijah and later went public about the sins of his spiritual father. Once believed to be the heir apparent, he was soon deemed a traitor. Nation members, Mr Ali included, were forbidden to associate with him. Malcolm, who "had seen gruesome images of black men bludgeoned at the hands of Muhammad's avengers," understood that "no one survived Muhammad's wrath." By 1964, he was a dead man walking.

Desperately, Malcolm tried to use his friendship with Mr Ali as leverage to bring himself back within the fold. But fearlessness in boxing does not always translate into fearlessness in life. Mr Ali slammed the door on his mentor. The authors conclude, "When Ali cut Malcolm out of his life, he revealed a new side of himself, ... an angrier, crueler side that would develop more and more in the coming years."

In February 1965, Malcolm - no longer a racial separatist - was gunned down. Decades later, Mr Ali said: "I wish I'd been able to tell Malcolm I was sorry, that he was right about so many things... If I could go back and do it over again, I would never have turned my back on him."

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Frenemies in the Nation of Islam

Dhirubhai Ambani to be given Padma Vibhushan award posthumously on Monday

The entire Ambani family is likely to be present at Rashtrapati Bhawan on Monday when Kokilaben Ambani receives the Padma Vibhushan award conferred on her husband and founder of Reliance Group, the late Dhirubhai Ambani.
Brothers Mukesh and Anil Ambani, along with their wives Nita and Tina, are likely to be present at the award function too, sources close to the Ambani family said.
Their daughters Nina Kothari and Deepti Salgaonkar are also expected to be present at the award function.
Dhirubhai Ambani, along with construction magnate Pallonji Shapoorji Mistry, Maruti Udyog Chairman R C Bhargava, Sun Pharmaceutical Founder Dilip Shanghvi and MasterCard Chief Executive Ajaypal S Banga are among those chosen for this year's highest civilian awards.
On Ambani being chosen for the Padma Vibhushan, Anil had in January described his father as "the greatest entrepreneur and wealth creator in the history of India".
"The true legacy of Dhirubhai lies in the inspiration that he continues to provide to millions of young people, who are dreaming impossible dreams, and setting out to achieve their entrepreneurial ambitions," he had said.
Mukesh had stated the award was "an honour to indomitable spirit of Indian entrepreneurship, innovation and ambition to always do better than the best in the world".
Ambani is being given the honour 14 years after his death on July 6, 2002.

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Dhirubhai Ambani to be given Padma Vibhushan award posthumously on Monday

Amitabh Bachchan to appear as James Bond on magazine cover

Amitabh Bachchan will replicate the stylish and suave spy James Bond for a magazine cover, which will see the megastar surrounded by a "bevy of beauties".

Bachchan, 73, said people of his age hardly get such opportunities.

"There is a photo shoot early morning for a magazine where they intend to replicate a certain Mr Bond... Surrounded by a bevy of beauties which I may add seems far too incongruous than any situation...

"But what the heck... Let's face it... It is not too often that a 74-year-old shall get such opportunity... So INDULGE !!!," he posted on his blog.

The "Piku" star, who is active on social media, was awake till 4am to write the blog for his fans, whom he addresses as "extended family (ef)".

"Much to the disappointment of many Ef who, if I may say, have reached some conclusion that I have gone to sleep without putting out the Blog or the Twitter or the FB .. Here I am .. alive and kicking at approximately 4 in the morning!.

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Amitabh Bachchan to appear as James Bond on magazine cover

Pope Francis slams Europe's 'anaesthetised conscience' over migrants

Pope Francis decried what he called Europe's "indifferent and anaesthetised conscience" over migrants, during Good Friday prayers in Rome during which he also slammed paedophile priests, arms dealers, fundamentalists and religious persecutors.
Tens of thousands gathered for the service, many clutching candles in the imposing surrounds of the city's famous Colosseum, where thousands of Christians are believed to have been killed in Roman times.
"O Cross of Christ, today we see you in the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas which have become insatiable cemeteries, reflections of our indifferent and anaesthetised conscience," the 79-year old pontiff said, referring to the thousands who set off in unseaworthy boats to reach Greece and the rest of Europe.
Francis has long called for the global community to open its doors to refugees and fight xenophobia — appeals which have intensified since a controversial deal between Europe and Turkey to expel migrants arriving in Greece.
The Argentine pontiff did not spare the ills within the Church, fiercely denouncing paedophile priests, describing them as those "unfaithful ministers who, instead of stripping themselves of their own vain ambitions, divest even the innocent of their dignity".
The Church continues to be dogged by cases of predator priests and past cover-ups. Just this month a French cardinal faced calls to resign over allegations he promoted a cleric who had a previous conviction for sexual abuse.
In the wake of this week's deadly attacks in Brussels, Francis slammed "terrorist acts committed by followers of some religions which profane the name of God and which use the holy name to justify their unprecedented violence".
The Pope added that "arms dealers who feed the cauldron of war with the innocent blood of our brothers and sisters" and he raged against "traitors who, for thirty pieces of silver, would consign anyone to death".
Francis also evoked the expressions on the faces of children fleeing war "who often only find death and many Pilates who wash their hands" — a reference to Pontius Pilate, who, according to Christian tradition, said he was bowing to public demand in ordering Jesus's crucifixion, in a bid to shrug off personal responsibility.

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Pope Francis slams Europe's 'anaesthetised conscience' over migrants

The New York Auto Show: The show-stoppers

Click on graphicThe New York International Auto Show (on till April 3) is offering some stellar machines this year. Among the biggest draws: Nissan and Koenigsegg supercars, the first Maserati SUV, and a gull-winged Lincoln. Here are the best-in-class revelations

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The New York Auto Show: The show-stoppers

Ramakant Keni is barred from psychic healing

It is not just his age that makes Ramakant Keni's handwriting shaky. The 94-year-old's prescriptions are seemingly dictated by an external force. Keni, a practitioner of parapsychology or psychic healing, typically holds the client's hands and communicates with the spirit world to make a diagnosis. Names of conditions that he senses will then be uttered or auto-written by him. "It is not a medical procedure but I don't bother about that. I just want to be cured," says a senior citizen, who most recently received "treatment" for glaucoma, hypertension and arthritis. This patient, a clerk, came to Keni after being disenchanted with allopathy, homeopathy and unani and has been a loyal for over ten years now.

Not everyone is a believer, of course. Keni carried out psychic healing at the Bombay Hospital starting in 1975. Last October, articles in local newspapers began questioning how he was allowed to run unapproved procedures in a renowned hospital that was recognised by the Medical Council of India. The council's Maharashtra wing took note of this, suspended his registration and launched legal action. The Bombay High Court has now instructed Keni to stop parapsychology but said he may continue practising allopathy.

A day after Keni resumed practice, people are waiting to see him at clinic no 21 in Bombay Hospital. Paintings of Ganesha and other deities (that Keni is said to have made) hang on the walls. Faint strains of music escape from his seemingly dark room as a patient emerges from inside. He wears his shoes and collects his phone from the assistant's desk, behind which there are some more paintings and a few figurines. Journalists can only get this far. The doctor has been strictly declining requests for interviews, his assistant says apologetically. Keni is upset with recent coverage of his work.

Years ago, when alternate therapies such as reiki and pranic healing had been in vogue, articles appeared on parapsychology complete with testimonials from Keni's top clients. He is said to count among his patients world names such as Shiv Kumar Sharma, Kishori Amonkar, Pandit Jasraj, and even the late writer Amrita Pritam. According to his book, Psychic Healing whose cover features a sketch of his face with ambiguous waves emanating from it, Marine Lines' Bombay Hospital was not his only outing at a major medical establishment. He supposedly snuck into Jaslok Hospital to treat Lok Nayak Jayprakash Narayan too. In fact, in this book, Keni also mentions having experienced and performed something called "absent" healing - a procedure that can be done from a distance of thousands of kilometres.

The 94-year-old claims to be a fellow of the International College of Angiology, New York, and of the American Geriatric Society. Sometime in 1971, he was introduced to spiritualism and psychic phenomena by an "elderly guide" who remains unnamed in his book. The book, in which he outlines his experiences, is circulated by a small Dadar-based publisher who sells a copy or two from time to time. It further reveals that although sceptical at first, Keni warmed up to the supernatural practice over time, becoming convinced of his ability to heal after a bunch of flowers he touched outlived another by six days. For this "test", he bought identical bouquets and kept them in two vases filled with water "from the same jug," he writes. One vase was labelled "healed flowers" and was placed on the same table as the other so that climactic conditions would be the same.

Keni was registered with Maharashtra Medical Council (MMC) since 1966 before the recent suspension. "After the court decision, he presented himself to the council and gave an undertaking that he will not practice parapsychology. He also asked for leniency considering his age, so the matter has been closed," says MMC president Kishor Taori. Following last year's articles and owing to his health, Keni had not visited the Bombay Hospital clinic for some months.

Faith in supernatural cures is not entirely surprising in a country where mainstream cinema for decades pushed dialogues about seriously-ill patients needing "prayers, not pills". Keni's faithful patient hopes, admittedly for the sake of his own health, that the 94-year-old doctor lives long.

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Ramakant Keni is barred from psychic healing

The rise of insta-management

Management literature is desperately searching for excellence again. It enjoyed a long run of success from the thoughtful genius of Peter Drucker to the philosophies of C K Prahalad, Jim Collins, Gary Hamel, Ram Charan and others, who intelligently studied global corporations. Memoirs from Lee Iaccoca, Jack Welch, Sam Walton, Lou Gerstner and other icons added heft to these efforts.

These books have the additional advantage of imparting appropriate gravitas to the office book shelf. But reading them demands some application of mind - even though most gurus are decent writers and the ex-honchos often hire competent ghosts. But what of those zillions of executives who neither read as a habit nor care to apply their minds too much when they do?

This opened up the market opportunity for the parallel trend of self-help book masquerading as management book. Ken Blanchard (The One Minute Manager) and Stephen Covey (The 7 Habit of Highly Effective People) were the early masters of this popular genre, but it was Spencer Johnson (Who Moved My Cheese?) who hit the ball out of the park. Their down-home style presented in short sentences and bullet points made them best-sellers.

Today, their successors are legion - each month brings to my desk earnest advice on time management, man management, maximising sales, leadership, and variations thereof. The savvier writers of these insta-management books ride a trend. Thus, since Steve Jobs never cared to explain his management philosophy (if he had one) to anyone, his death produced a mini-industry in Jobs- and/or Apple-mania. If Walter Isaacson's authorised door-stopper was too much to absorb, why there was Inside Apple: The Secrets Behind the Past and Future Success of Steve Jobs' Iconic Brand, a neat 240-page primer, Finding the Next Steve Jobs and many more.

One lucrative offshoot is the "lessons" category. Legendary football manager Alex Fergusson, for instance, came out with Leading, basically the third variation of his autobiography couched in vaguely didactic terms. India after economic liberalisation saw an avalanche of books offering management lessons from Hinduism; the Mahabharata and Ramayana, its principal characters and the Gita in particular. The latest to mine a new lucrative seam is a book offering management lessons from Bollywood hits - from Lagaan, Lakshya, Om Shanti Om and so on.

All of which reminds me of the British TV star John Cleese, who is also a management trainer. Come to think of it, he's probably missed an opportunity. There must be management lessons in Monty Python or Fawlty Towers, surely?

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The rise of insta-management

Movie Review: The 'almost' epic battle in Batman v Superman

Unlike Marvel, DC Comics-based superhero films have never been clubbed together. Whether it be Christopher Nolan’s Batman Trilogy or the various Superman films the world has seen, each film has been praised or panned independently. But Zack Snyder-directed Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice did an Iron Man and officially kicked off the Justice League franchise.

Ever since the film was announced in 2013, comic book and film aficionados were both speculative and excited for the film’s release. I, too, had been waiting with bated breath, especially since Christian Bale’s Batman would now be replaced with a darker, grittier one. The trailers showed promise but the two-and-a-half-hour-long film turned out to be an incoherent jumble of unnecessary sub-plots and an overall weak storyline. The film stars Ben Affleck and  Henry Cavill in titular roles, while Amy Adams and  Laurence Fishburne reprise their roles as Lois Lane and Perry White, respectively.

The film revolves around Batman (Affleck), the protector of Gotham, and his fear that Superman (Cavill) could turn to the dark side if left unchecked. After battling General Zod in Metropolis, Superman fails to consider the destruction he leaves in his wake, thus incurring Batman’s wrath. What follows is not the much-awaited showdown between the two but various sub-plots, such as the one where Lex Luthor (Eisenberg) tries to create a weapon made of kryptonite found at the bottom of the Indian Ocean or the one where Diana Prince/Wonder Woman (portrayed by Gal Gadot) searches for incriminating evidence about her secret identity. The showdown comes much later in the second half and, perhaps, is the only satisfying bit of the film.

Snyder’s Watchmen had garnered a lot of praise for the way it was executed. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Batman vs Superman. The first half is excruciatingly slow and rotates between Superman and Batman taking turns to brood. The film’s Batman is a far cry from Nolan’s and Affleck manages to portray it effectively. That said, it doesn’t matter much mainly due to the absence of a watertight plot. Cavill, who reprises his role as Superman, is reduced to nothing but a brooding pretty boy with superhuman strength. Though it sounds like a broken record, the weak story structure also restricts both Affleck and Cavill from giving their best. Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman is more a pretty face than a superhero, only springing to action during the film’s climax.

The second half contains the fight everyone had been waiting for. Snyder has tried to allude the ancient battle between Man and God. Superman represents a God, the omnipotent and the indestructible. While Batman portrays the bravery in men and the courage to stand up for what they think is right. In the end, you get a satisfying brawl between the two. The fight is well-directed but sadly not worth the 180-minute torture that Snyder puts us through.

The film does have one saving grace — Lex Luthor. Jesse Eisenberg's Luthor is probably the only character who has more than one expression. Ranting about hell and power, Eisenberg’s spasmodic Luthor brings to mind Heath Ledger’s Joker. Coaxing Superman for a death match against Batman, while playing with a kitchen timer, is akin to the insanity Joker shows in The Dark Knight. Eisenberg not only gives a stellar performance, but also reveals his acting range. Having replaced a stalwart like Kevin Spacey as Luthor, Eisenberg holds his own with unparalleled ease.

What could have been the biggest blockbuster of the year has been reduced to another run-of-the-mill film churned out by Hollywood studios. Marvel has nothing to worry about, the DC franchise will need nothing short of a miracle to be as successful.

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Movie Review: The 'almost' epic battle in Batman v Superman

Mitali Saran: Here's where the BJP can get off

Remember the enormous brouhaha over Dadri last year, after a mob killed a man over rumours of beef in his fridge? This week, when two Muslim cattle herders were murdered and hung from a tree, it passed rather quietly. People idly wondered whether it was because they were Muslim, or because they may have been cattle smugglers, but nobody seemed shocked that two people were killed.
That’s the distance that Modi’s India has travelled in six short months.There are so many new normals that it makes your head spin. 
In the new normal, people whose sentiments are hurt understandably take the law into their own hands. In the new normal, you are not innocent until proven guilty — random people can demand that you prove stuff on the spot, including things you aren’t required to prove, like patriotism, and if they don’t like your answer, well, nobody can tell what might happen (their sentiments might be hurt). In the new normal, we treat our universities like nests of young vipers that need to be exterminated. JNU became a national flashpoint; now Hyderabad Central University’s food, water, electricity and Internet have been shut down, kids’ ATM cards blocked, and students thrashed. In the new normal, the Chinese authorities might have been on to something at Tiananmen Square.
In other words, the state and some of the people of India are more and more of the view that certain provocations justify spontaneous vigilante violence or murder, and that in the case of these increasingly hot potatoes, the law is just an impediment to expedient justice.
The hottest of these potatoes, suddenly, is being ‘anti-national’. Nobody knows what this means, but if you find yourself on the receiving end of that term, you can expect things to end in tears. The BJP has just formally adopted ‘nationalism’ as one of its dearest loves, having seen what a blind hot McCarthyite fury it can whip up in no time, and what a fine distraction that is from the failures of ‘development’. Say what you like about me, pal, but insult the motherland and my exploding eye-veins will bloody your clothes before I even get my hands around your treacherous throat. The party wants people to prove their patriotism by saying ‘Bharat mata ki jai’. Not saying this phrase is not anti-national, according to RSS Joint General Secretary Dattatreya Hosabale, but saying that you aren’t going to say it is anti-national. Okaaaay.
Some of the blindest, stupidest violence is coming from cow-guarding, cow-worshipping, cow-obsessed organisations that get away with murdering people on suspicion of, well, somehow being around cows. Cows being a great love of majoritarian religious nationalists, a number of people set themselves on fire to demand that the cow be named Rashtra Mata. I was very sorry to hear that despite their best efforts, these people were unable to eliminate themselves from the gene pool.
India is currently suffering from boiling frog syndrome — the BJP is turning the heat up steadily, while everyone in the pot sticks their fingers in their ears, closes their eyes, and prays to the GDP, choosing not to notice they’re being boiled alive. The RSS and the BJP have somehow confused themselves and large numbers of people into thinking that when they say something, it somehow magically becomes relevant and true. It doesn’t. The nationalism narrative is the fakest, lowest, most ideas-free ploy in the world, and none of us should play.
Is the Opposition calling this out? Well, the Congress in Maharashtra earned itself another world of contempt by doing the opposite — it joined in to the call to expel an Assembly member from the AIMIM who refused to say ‘Bharat mata ki jai’. Great going, Congress! We’ll be sure to turn to you as the rational alternative, you venal, spineless collection of craven opportunists. If you were half as interested in finding a vision for India as you are in clinging to your granular vote bank interests, you might have more votes.
No, there’s only one way to turn down the temperature before we’re all cooked, dear citizens, and that is: if you are still in possession of your rational faculties, do yourself and your country a favour, and stand by them. The BJP is not the law. It does not get to redefine your values unless you choose to let it. It’s just a bullying, dirty power player that will do a great deal of damage before some election cycle tosses it out on its ear.
Until then, and until a reasonable political opposition emerges, it’s really going to be up to each citizen to hold the line — to say, go ahead and make big round scary eyes and growly noises, you’re still not the boss of me, you don’t intimidate me, and I refuse to play boiling frogs-boiling frogs.
Mitali Saran is a Delhi-based writer mitali.saran@gmail.com

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Mitali Saran: Here's where the BJP can get off

A world without the internet

I HATE THE INTERNET
A Useful Novel
Jarett Kobek
We Heard You Like Books
280 pages; $15.95

In the movie Machete, there's a scene in which Danny Trejo rips out an opponent's intestines and, leaping from a window, uses them like rope to rappel down the side of a building. As action scenes go, this one has extra habanero.

In his new novel, I Hate the Internet, Jarett Kobek performs a similar manoeuvre on the viscera of the American psyche, at least as regards the so-called information highway. I can't decide if, on his way down, Mr Kobek is laughing or weeping.

Don't be put off by this book's feeble title. I Hate the Internet isn't a book about, I don't know, why your selfies always make you look dumpy. Instead it's a grainy political and cultural rant, a sustained shriek about power and morality in a new global era. It's a glimpse at a lively mind at full boil.

"Nothing says individuality," Mr Kobek comments about a generation's laptops and cellphones, "like 500 million consumer electronics built by slaves. Welcome to hell." He's just getting tuned up.

Mr Kobek is a Turkish-American writer who lives in California. His first novel, Atta (2011), was a fictionalised biography of the September 11 hijacker-pilot Mohamed Atta.

His new novel is ostensibly the story of a middle-aged comic-book writer named Adeline. She lives in San Francisco and mourns its gentrification at the hands of venture capitalists and tech start-ups. The city's misfits, of whom she is one, are being pushed out.

The story begins as Adeline commits "the only unforgivable sin of the 21st century." That is, invited to give a lecture, she neglects to notice that someone is recording her. Adeline has other problems, Mr Kobek suggests: "(1) She was a woman in a culture that hated women. (2) She'd become kind of famous. (3) She'd expressed unpopular opinions."

Some of these opinions, which become infamous on YouTube, are on why women should be leery of working for tech companies. "All these crazy young ones are lining up to burn in their very own Shirtwaist Factories, screaming that they're empowered by the very technology that's set them aflame," Adeline says, in her goofy trans-Atlantic accent, which makes her sound like "a drugged out Diana Vreeland."

Some of these opinions are complaints about the fantasies of fame and power in the songs, videos and social media of today's pop stars. "A wide range of humanity believed that Beyonce and Rihanna were inspirations rather than vultures," we read. "Adeline had spit on their gods." Adeline barely knows what Twitter is. Attack Bey and RiRi? She's about to find out about its self-righteous side.

Adeline's story sits alongside that of a younger woman, Ellen, whose life is destroyed after an old boyfriend's pictures of her, taken during sex, are splashed across the web. Each of these women, in Mr Kobek's hands, is interesting and sympathetic. But I Hate the Internet is fundamentally a platform for the author's slashing social criticism.

There's a bit of the French writer Michel Houellebecq in Mr Kobek's profane satire. There's a bit of Thomas Piketty in his obsession with economic inequality. There's a bit of the Ambrose Bierce of The Devil's Dictionary in his ability to take words and ideas and invest them with uglier and thus usually more accurate meanings.

New definitions? Comics, here, are "subtle pornography for the mentally backward." Comic-book conventions are "an excuse for people to dress up like the intellectual properties of major corporations." Money is "the unit by which people measured humiliation. What would you do for a dollar?"

Amazon: "an unprofitable website dedicated to the destruction of the publishing industry." Instagram: "the first social media platform to which the only sane reaction was hate." Then there's this about George W Bush's paintings: "Like peering into the shattered mind of a suicidal beagle that's lost depth perspective."

This is a shaggy and quite entertaining novel of ideas. The two most prominent of these are: Why are humans so eager, on sites like Twitter and Facebook, to give away their intellectual property to wealthy white men? And: What has happened to political activism? Do people think typing 140-character morality lectures is pushing society forward?

A majority of these tweeted opinions, he notes, are smug and hypocritical when not utterly inane. Take Twitter and racism, which brings out the worst in almost everyone. "Expressing concern about racism was a new religion," Mr. Kobek writes, "and focusing on language rather than political mechanics was an effortless, and meaningless, way of making sure one was seen in a front-row pew of the new church."

Like all jeremiads, I Hate the Internet is far better at posing questions than formulating answers. You will sometimes wish that a woman, or an African-American, had composed these acid observations about feminism and race.

At times the author loses his focus; at other times you will sense a bit of halitotic spittle striking your chin. Yet this book has soul as well as nerve. It suggests that, as the author writes, "the whole world was on a script of loss, and people only received their pages moments before they read their lines."

My advice? Log off Twitter for a day. Pick this up instead.

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A world without the internet

PM Modi, Sania Mirza among Time magazine probables for most influential people

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, tennis star Sania Mirza and actor Priyanka Chopra are among the probable contenders named by Time magazine for its annual list of the most influential people in the world.

Time will announce its 'TIME 100', the annual list of the world's 100 most influential people next month.

While its editors will determine the ultimate honorees, the publication has asked readers to vote from among 127 "world leaders, great minds in science and technology, outstanding figures in the arts and other icons of the moment" on who they think deserve recognition.

Time said "Modi remains a powerful voice on the world stage," and while he saw his domestic agenda "sidetracked by political squabbles" in 2015, his country still leads the world in economic growth.

Modi was named among Time's 100 most influential people in the world last year and President Barack Obama had written a profile for him for the magazine.

On Mirza, Time said India's best female tennis player secured the number one ranking in the world for women's doubles "while helping to redefine the role of female athletes in her home country."

Time said Chopra, one of the highest paid actors in Bollywood, has "caught Hollywood's attention" for her role in the drama series 'Quantico' and "will continue to do so in the Baywatch remake".

Indian-born CEOs of the world's top technology companies Google and Microsoft are also among the list of 127 probables for the annual honour.

Time said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, co-founder Larry Page's "right hand", now oversees core businesses such as Android and Youtube for the tech giant.

Under Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the publication said, Windows10 launched "successfully", the cloud business is "booming" and new technologies like the Hololens have industry analysts "excited".

Also on the list is Indian-origin actor Aziz Ansari.

The list also includes SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, singer Rihanna, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, Harry Potter author JK Rowling, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, Myanmar's pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Pope Francis, reality TV star Kim Kardashian, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.

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PM Modi, Sania Mirza among Time magazine probables for most influential people

1962 revisited

1962: THE WAR THAT WASN’T
The Definitive Account of the Clash between Indian and China
Shiv Kunal Verma
Aleph
425 pages; Rs 995

In 1962, the current Indian prime minister was 12 years old. His Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, was nine. But despite the passage of so much time, India has stubbornly refused to declassify records that could help pinpoint the underlying causes of that disaster. This book attempts to fill that gap, in part at least.

1962 was a stunning defeat for India and the foreign policy repercussions continue to this day. If the Chinese had not opted for a unilateral ceasefire and pulled back, they could possibly have annexed everything north of the Brahmaputra. Apart from territory lost in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh, the Indian army suffered huge casualties.

This book does not challenge the conventional narrative. It adds information that reinforces it.

Jawaharlal Nehru, then prime minister, trusted the Chinese too much and did not trust his own army. Defence Minister V K Krishna Menon knew nothing of war and was paranoid about possible army coups. The incompetent Lt General B M Kaul had never seen action but he was pitch-forked into command due to his close relationship with Nehru and Menon. Kaul ran away from the opening battle of Namka Chu.

The orders given to frontline commanders were contradictory and unrealistic since the high command did not know the terrain, or the ground situation. The army was short of ammunition. Troops had no warm clothes. They faced an enemy that enjoyed massive numerical superiority apart from being better-armed and acclimatised. To cap it all, the Chinese had superior intelligence.

Indian strategy and tactics were rigid and farcical. Time and again, formations were outflanked or hit from behind. Some strong defensive setups were abandoned in panic. In other cases, men fought to their last bullet against hopeless odds. The powers-that-be refused to use the air force in an offensive role. Towards the end of the conflict, an absurd request was made for support by the US Air Force, without even consulting the Air Chief Marshal.

This book makes an honest attempt to understand the events that led up to the clash. It starts with the Simla Accord of 1914 where Sir Henry McMahon doodled lines insouciantly on an inaccurately-drawn map. It describes the evolution of the Sino-Indian relationship in the 1950s when Panchsheel and Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai were buzzwords. That was when Maoist China annexed Xinjiang in the west and Tibet in the south and started making claims on Arunachal and Ladakh, based on Tibet's historical associations with those areas. It must be noted that India then barely had a presence in what was known as NEFA (the North-East Frontier Agency).

It is the author's contention that Nehru concealed border clashes as long as he could, and then made disastrous decisions in pursuance of a "Forward Policy". He also criticises the decision to replace the Assam Rifles with the regular army in upcountry Arunachal.

At the same time, the relationships between Nehru, Menon, the legendary B N Mullik, who headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB), and the Indian army led to a surfeit of internecine intrigues. The IB did not communicate what it knew. That crippled the army's decision-making and contributed to the defeat.

There is a workmanlike description of the hostilities in October-November 1962 as well as descriptions of the battles with maps of local terrain. The book also refers to accounts by Chinese military historians, which adds more useful detail.

There are sundry eyewitness accounts. The author's father, the late Major General Ashok Kalyan Verma, was a young officer in 2 Rajput, when it took a hammering in Arunachal. He leveraged those family connections to interview officers and JCOs who fought in 1962. Those accounts are gold in the Indian context where battles are generally described in drab officialese.

The horror and fatalism of men knowing that they are being asked to follow senseless orders, which will result in their deaths, comes through. Perhaps the most poignant is the account of the Subahdar threatened with close arrest by Kaul for saying that this is the first time men are being asked to charge out of a nullah to attack a numerically superior force sitting on surrounding heights.

Some 54 years later, the protagonists are mostly dead (Mao, Nehru, Menon, et al), or long retired and elderly. It was a squalid affair. Incompetence, nepotism and lack of coordination between the IB and the defence forces all played a role in the debacle. The culpability must be shared between the political establishment, the bureaucracy and the armed forces.

The Henderson-Brooks Report with its narrow brief of looking at the military lacunae of 1962 was commissioned but it has never been declassified. Nor have other pertinent records been released (the request to the US government to deploy its airforce is available from declassified American archives).

This book throws light on some of the events. But it is one man's interpretation and, of necessity, based on incomplete information. It is said that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. But what can one say about a nation that assiduously tries to bury its own past and conceal it from its own citizens?

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1962 revisited

Tirupati to deposit 2.3 tonnes of gold

The Punjab National Bank (PNB) has offered highest rate of interest, 1.75 per cent per annum, to Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD), which manages one of the richest temples in the world, for a three-year deposit under Gold Monetisation Scheme (GMS).

TTD will invest around 2.3 tonnes of gold with fineness not less than 0.995 in the PNB. While TTD will directly invest around 1.3 tonnes of gold, another one tonne of gold investment will be shifted from State Bank of India (SBI) where the existing gold investment matures in March.

TTD will invest another 1.4 tonnes of gold of mixed category — ornaments, articles, etc. — with Indian Overseas Bank. The bank will be responsible for taking the mixed gold to mint and getting it purified, including transportation, insurance, melting, conversion and assaying charges. For the refined gold, Indian Overseas Bank has quoted interest rate of 1.25 per cent per annum for a three-year deposit under GMS.

TTD prefers to redeem gold rather than cash at maturity, as offered under earlier Gold Deposit Scheme (GDS). According to the temple authorities, 4.5 tonnes of gold already in banks under GDS fetches an interest of 80 kg of pure gold every year.

Earlier, the investment committee of TTD had decided to keep the gold corpus intact. In December, the committee said it would meet government of India and RBI officials, seeking amendments in medium-term and long-term deposits under GMS so that interest is paid in gold only.

The short-term deposits under GMS are similar to GDS, which is being followed by TTD. The temple management had earlier said that the existing rate of interest offered by banks on short-term deposits under GMS was very less and asked the banks for higher rate of interest.

3 tonnes: Gold already mobilised under GMS till last week2.3 tonnes: Amount of gold TTD has promised to deposit with PNB, other temples to follow1.75 % per annum: Rate of interest quoted by PNB to TTD under 3-year deposit scheme4.5 tonnes: TTD deposits of gold under GDS, the earlier scheme44.5 kg of raw gold: Shree Siddhivinayak Temple Trust looks to deposit in GMS4-5 tonnes: Bankers' estimate of the amount of gold that could be mobilised if temples deposit 2.5 per cent of gold5,000 tonnes: Industry estimate of gold lying with temples50: Collecting centres that have joined the GMS, others may join once scheme picks upGovt assured stakeholders last week that the scheme will be further simplifiedFew banks have signed the tripartite agreement with CPTCs even after several months of chasing them

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Tirupati to deposit 2.3 tonnes of gold

The bitter fight over sugary drinks

SODA POLITICS
Taking on Big Soda [and Winning]
Marion Nestle
Oxford University Press
508 pages; Rs 676

Last month, Coca-Cola suspended bottling operations at three plants in India, including in Rajasthan. This plant has been in the eye of protests by local farmers, who complained that the company was using depleting ground water reserves in the parched north-western state. Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages, a subsidiary of The Coca-Cola Co, however, has claimed that it was a responsible corporate citizen, harvesting rainwater and encouraging farmers to use drip irrigation, which is a more efficient method of watering crops than traditional alternatives.

While the debate over corporate ethics will continue, the country's Rs 14,000-crore soft drinks industry is facing other challenges. In the Budget for 2016-17, the Union government raised excise duty on soft drinks to 21 per cent from 18 per cent. This is the second year that the sector has faced a levy increase and, this time it will affect the price by one to two per cent, in turn hitting sales. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, the country's two major soft drink producers, are already reeling from single-digit volume growth, with more and more customers moving to healthier drinks.

In this context, Marion Nestle's new book on how to fight the behemoth that is the soft drink industry and achieving that feat of registering a win for good health advocates is timely. The Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at the New York University, Ms Nestle has been at the forefront of the fight for food choice, healthy living and against obesity in the US since before publishing her breakout book, Food Politics (2002). Now, she focuses her attention on the despicable marketing practices soft drink companies employ to expand sales and profit at the cost of global health.

At the start of her book, Ms Nestle writes about her fascination with soft drinks, or sodas: "Sodas are astonishing products. Little more than flavoured sugar water, these drinks cost practically nothing to produce or buy, yet have turned their makers - principally Coca-Cola and PepsiCo - into multibillion-dollar industries with global recognition, distribution, and political power." She also writes about why advocacy against soft drinks is necessary: "An occasional sugary drink is hardly a health concern. But many Americans - especially those who are young, members of minority groups, and poor - habitually drink large volumes of soda on a daily basis at great harm to their health."

Soft drink companies, Ms Nestle demonstrates in her book, target these vulnerable groups. In the chapter "Starting Early: Marketing to Infants, Children, and Teens", she links the habit of TV watching and soft drink consumption by children: "Soda drinking is so closely linked to watching television that its consumption can be predicted by formula: the probability that children will consume sodas up to three times per week rises 50 per cent for every hour a day they watch television, and by 60 per cent if they are watching commercials."

Like everything else in this wonderfully erudite book, this information has been sourced from a scholarly study - one that goes on to claim: "Nine out of 10 food advertisements shown during Saturday morning children's television programming are for foods high in fat, sodium, or added sugars, or low in nutrients." But this book is also about the solutions, which, for Ms Nestle, lies in advocacy. In subsequent chapters, she outlines tried and tested tactics used by public health advocates and campaigners in the US - and can be adopted by their counterparts in the other countries.

The breadth of the book's ambition is evident in Ms Nestle incorporating voices from within the soft drink industry into conversations about how to promote healthy living. In the course of committed advocacy, it is often easier to aim one's attacks at the monoliths of corporate structures, but it is more difficult to deal with individuals. One of the most interesting individuals in Soda Politics is Dr Derek Yach, a South African health professional who supervised a 2003 consultation report for the World Health Organization (WHO) "aimed at establishing a research basis for a global strategy to reduce obesity." As expected, he ran into trouble with "big soda" and was forced to quit his job as director of non-communicable diseases at the WHO, even as his report was being published.

Then, in 2007, he joined PepsiCo as the vice-president of global health policy. Next year, he published an editorial in British journal Public Health Nutrition explaining the move, and PepsiCo Chief Executive Office Indra Nooyi explained the hiring as: "We have asked Derek to change this company; in five years we want to have most of our product line meet the international standards supporting life-long health." So how successful was Dr Yach? About 65 per cent, he claims. While he did manage to steer PepsiCo towards producing healthier alternatives for soft drinks, with the global recession impacting profits, the company had to focus more and more on its core products, even as Dr Yach left for other engagements. This incident illustrates the complexity of the battle and how people inside and outside the industry must come together to make it a success.

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The bitter fight over sugary drinks