Books

Fine speeches compilation

The Peace Dividend; Hindustan Times; Price: Rs.395; 173 pp

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That’s why The Peace Dividend — Progress for India & South Asia, a compendium of speeches, papers, keynote addresses and interviews presented at an eponymous conference convened by the Hindustan Times in Delhi in December last year caught this reviewer’s eye. The management of the daily deserves the nation’s thanks and congratulations for getting its Hindustan Times Leadership Initiative off the ground at the conference. Conversely the rest of the media needs to be roundly condemned for ignoring this vitally important conference at the time it was staged.

There is a unique petty-mindedness within the Indian media which prompts the editors of publications to completely blank out socially beneficial initiatives and news reports of rival publications to maintain the delusion that they (rival publications) don’t matter or even exist. But for the reproduction of the papers of the inaugural conference of the HT Leadership Initiative, non-readers of the Hindustan Times would never have known that such a high-powered conference was ever convened. Ditto for the India Today Conclave staged early this year which was reported only in India Today. Quite evidently in the over-hyped Indian media petty spite disguised as business rivalry takes precedence over public interest.

Therefore one must thank divine providence for imbuing the management of HT with the wisdom to publish the papers presented at the Peace Dividend seminar in book form. Attractively packaged with intelligent layout and attention to detail (short biographic sketches of all speakers) this valuable compilation presents the viewpoints and insights of a galaxy of political scientists (Francis Fukuyama, Richard Haas); politicians (A.B Vajpayee, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, Omar Abdullah, Sonia Gandhi, Benazir Bhutto, Madeline Albright); bureaucrats (N.K.Singh, Bimal Jalan) and business leaders (Anil Ambani, M.K.Banga) on ways and means to prompt peace to break out in South Asia for the greater good of over a quarter of humankind which scratches out a living on this wretched patch of earth bedevilled by territorial disputes, ethnic conflict, religious division and pernicious corruption.

Even at the risk of being criticised for being too impressionable, this reviewer needs to say that each one of the papers presented at the conference and reproduced — no doubt after considerable editing and cleaning up —is brilliant, offering a plethora of insights, breakthrough news and data. Quite clearly the major impediment to harvesting the peace dividend in the subcontinent is the disputed status of Kashmir which has been hanging fire for over half a century.

On this issue both Mufti Mohammed Sayeed and Omar Abdullah presented papers which ache with sincerity and frustration over the fact that two generations in Kashmir have not been able to enjoy the basic pleasures of life which are taken for granted by people all over the world. But while they call for all-inclusive parleys, neither of them has the gumption and guts to recommend a radically new solution. It’s all very well to lament the fate of innocents caught in the Indo-Pak crossfire, but self-evidently a problem which has defied solution for half a century requires radical departure from stated positions.

Quite obviously the solution to the Kashmir problem which has defied bilateral settlement for 56 years is third party mediation. To this extent the Pakistan position which accepts this is more logical than tediously parroted phrases to the effect that Kashmir is an integral part of India and that it is entirely a bilateral Indo-Pak issue. As the eminent jurist Ram Jethmalani has highlighted in a well-argued newspaper column (Asian Age) this adamance of South Block, New Delhi ignores our own Constitution of India (Article 51) which advises that international disputes should be settled by third party mediation. Though passionate and well argued, the papers of Sayeed and Abdullah make no reference to third party mediation — the International Court of Justice — for example.

Former Pakistan prime minister Benazir Bhutto’s was perhaps the most well-argued and purposive paper presented at the conference and included in this valuable volume. Bhutto exhibits unusual sensitivity to the grim reality that India and Pakistan are now nuclear nations and this new geo-political reality lends a new urgency to the need for the two subcontinental neighbours to swiftly settle their differences and enable their desperately poor people to reap the peace dividend. The way forward argues Bhutto, is for larger bilateral trade flows and soft borders in Kashmir and in the subcontinent following the European common market experiment which has resulted in the European Union even as political disputes are still being negotiated. "I suggest that expanding trade be a useful adjunct to the political process, instead of being constrained by it," says Bhutto.

Yet at bottom one can’t but help experiencing a deep despair about the subcontinent’s two-faced politicians. Former prime minister A.B. Vajpayee who inaugurated the conference with honeyed words turned a blind eye to a war waged by the state against its own citizens in Gujarat. Benazir Bhutto has a slew of criminal charges for graft and corruption — for some of which she was recently found guilty by a Swiss court — against her.

Can the subcontinent’s inevitably two-faced leaders, experts in the art of projecting charisma and sincerity before the public, who transform into corrupt calculators in office ever deliver the peace dividend to the perpetually short-changed people of the subcontinent? This compilation of fine speeches and papers highlights that there are indeed ways to realise the long-cherished goals of peace, freedom and prosperity for one-fifth of humanity which scratches out a meagre living in south Asia. But it also magnifies the reality that there’s no will.Dilip Thakore

Rooted in rootlessness

The Global Soul by Pico Iyer; Vintage Books; Price: Rs. 600; 303 pp

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Regular readers of Iyer’s travelogues are likely to be aware that his unusual name is only one of the many factors that have contributed to the deeply experienced sense of displacement and dispossession that pervade his detailed accounts and acute insights.

At the beginning of this book, the author describes a ferocious forest fire in California which reduces his house to a pile of cinders, following which Iyer finds himself — quite literally — "homeless". This provokes a reflection on how actual homelessness in the wake of the fire uncannily and symbolically parallels the existential homelessness that has always been second nature to him. "I’d often referred to myself as homeless — an Indian born in England and moving to California as a boy, with no real base of operations or property even in my thirties. I’d spent much of the previous year among the wooden houses of Japan, reading the ‘burning house’ poems of Buddhist monks and musing on the value of living without possessions or a home. But now, all the handy metaphors were actual..."

From these musings Iyer has invented a species described as the ‘global soul’ to cope with the troubling sense of rootlessness that haunts him wherever he goes. And in each of the seven sections of this book, Iyer not always playfully, interrogates the very notion of home and advantages of belonging to a specific homeland or country with relentless irony and accuracy, regarding himself as neither exile, expatriate, refugee, or nomad, but rather, a universal individual who is at home everywhere while belonging nowhere in particular at the same time.

The book is saturated with examples of this paradoxic post-modern condition that he inhabits, each one underscoring the ubiquitousness and isolation of the global soul’s disbelonging in locations as far apart as California, Hong Kong, England, Toronto, Atlanta, India, and Japan. While noting that the 20th century witnessed the largest migrations in history, he comments, "Therein lay many of the new excitements of our time, and therein lay the pathos," of this new world order of crumbling borders and boundaries where "everything is so made up of everywhere else that I hardly notice that I’m sitting in a Parisian café just outside Chinatown in San Francisco, talking to a Mexican-American friend about biculturalism."

But this trenchant observation is merely one thread in a narrative that like a web, develops in many different directions all at once, knitting together insights and reactions to the dizzying conundrum of post-modern existence which offers a shared commonality even amidst the hard facts of cultural, linguistic, financial and ethnic differences. Where is humankind headed and have we already morphed into a planet of estranged aliens?

These are questions to which The Global Soul does not provide any ready answers. Inasmuch as it is a travelogue about numerous journeys, many arrivals and departures, it takes the reader along as well, leaving us wondering if it is really true that to belong to one country isn’t enough these days and that more durable bonds of kinship are forged instead, in airports, airplanes, on answering machines and at the Olympic Games. "The global soul," writes Iyer, "is best characterised as one who falls between all categories, being neither a local nor a foreigner." Iyer’s conclusion seems to be that the concept of home, in the traditional understanding of the word, is a myth, a journey of the imagination to ancestral origins — which this author finds neither in England, where he was born, nor in India, where his parents were born, but rather — and unexpectedly — with his Japanese girlfriend Hiroko in Japan.

There is a wealth of arresting, thought-provoking passages in this book and interesting anecdotes and observations about the people Iyer meets on his travels. But at the same time, despite his perspicacity and wit, the main point of what Iyer tries to communicate gets lost at times in a general clutter of words, and more words. If you can find yourself through language, it is equally easy to lose yourself in verbiage, and that’s what seems to happen to Pico Iyer over and over again in an otherwise intriguingly structured narrative. But the book, overall, leaves one with a sense of inconclusiveness. It is as if the author has not been able to locate himself anywhere at all, despite the many destinations he has visited. Maybe that’s the final irony of The Global Soul — it’s provincial at heart.