Books

Valuable contribution to development debate

India Untouched — The forgotten face of rural poverty by Abraham M. George; EastWest Books; Price: Rs.295; 400 pp

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But celebrated NRI writers tend to be innocent of the nuances of economics particularly business and project management, ignorance of which has been post-independence India’s biggest bugbear.

A successful businessman’s perspective and insight is the distinguishing characteristic of India Untouched — The forgotten face of rural poverty. It sets this valuable work apart from other treatises analysing — or attempting to analyse — the curious conundrum of how and why high-potential, resource-rich India gifted with the youngest and most enterprising population in the world is among the poorest, most oppressed and wretchedest nations on God’s good Earth.

Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram)-born Abraham M. George began his career as a commissioned officer in the Indian Army before a hearing disability forced him to take an early discharge and migrate to the United States where his mother was a research scientist in NASA. In a modest, perhaps too-brief autobiographical first chapter, George reveals that after acquiring a doctorate in development finance and economics from New York University, he began working with Chemical Bank, now part of the J.P. Morgan Chase Bank. Two years later, he went solo to "offer computerised systems to large multinational corporations to enable them deal with their financial risks". And when personal computers revolutionised the IT business, he tailored his business to this new development "with great success". "As I began to make money, I dreamt of the day when I would save enough to pursue work for the poor," he writes.

This ambition was realised in 1995 when he sold the company which he built "from the ground up to a large multinational firm, thereby concluding another chapter of my life". In that year he returned to India to promote the George Foundation, "a non-profit charitable trust that would work towards the goal of addressing some of the most persistent problems in Indian society, especially with regard to the poor".

Out of this caring, compassionate resolve was born the noble, on-going, and by all accounts highly successful, initiatives of the George Foundation which are not as well known as they should be. They are: Shanti Bhavan — "a world-class boarding institution for children from the poorest homes and for those belonging mostly to the lowest castes, mainly the ‘untouchables’" on the outskirts of Bangalore; an awareness and advocacy campaign to abate the incidence of lead poisoning which was "affecting over 100 million children in India’s cities"; the establishment of a rural hospital and community centre catering to people in 20 villages on the Karnataka-Tamil Nadu border; and the promotion of a communication and journalism college in Bangalore.

One would expect — as George did — that a non-profit foundation with such transparent and charitable intent would be welcomed with open arms and hearts by everyone within the establishment. But the official Indian establishment made up of uniquely me-first politicians and bureaucrats — who like the old man in the Sindbad legend have clambered atop the back of the nation and won’t get off — is sui generis: in a class by itself. And the burden of India Untouched is a recitation of the difficulties of doing charity — let alone business — in the perverse society fashioned by post-independence India’s astonishingly venal neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) conspiracy which behind the façade of mealy-mouthed socialism, practices primitive tooth-and-claw capital accumulation. A recently-released World Bank study indicates that the average lead time of 89 days to start a business in India is longer than of any other country worldwide. As India Untouched makes it depressingly clear, establishing public charitable institutions — in a society which needs them desperately — takes even more time, money and frustration.

Fortunately the book has a happy ending. Despite the worst efforts of the powers that be, the projects which the George Foundation undertook are up and running. The world-class model Shanti Bhavan School in the Dharmapuri district of Tamil Nadu which has 171 children on its muster-roll, is a live reality. The foundation’s rural hospital and community health centre provides medical aid to 35,000 people in the district; the public sector oil companies (prompted by the Supreme Court) have reduced the lead content of their petrol and diesel, and the Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media, Bangalore (George quite rightly believes that poor quality journalism is also to blame for widespread official corruption and neglect of rural India) churns out 23 graduates every year.

Unquestionably India Untouched which has received ringing encomiums from a whole host of notables in India and abroad including a foreword by (US consumer rights champion and presidential candidate) Ralph Nader as evidenced by the blurbs on the jacket cover, is a valuable addition to the perpetual debate on national development. But one gets the feeling that like most urbanites the author has under-estimated the sheer scale and size of India’s under-development which limits the impact of direct interventions by way of philanthropic projects. Even great projects such as Bunker and Aruna Roy’s Tilonia experiment; Anna Hazare’s model village in Ravalgaon Siddhi and Baba Amte’s Anandwan while all very successful in their own right, are but isolated dots on a huge map.

Therefore quite clearly systemic or structural change which stimulates policy interventions and greater budget allocations, is as — perhaps more — important. Ironically, almost five years ago George was invited to invest a modest sum (in return for equity) in this enterprise (EducationWorld) which is building the pressure of public opinion for structural reform of the education system. Regrettably he rejected the offer with the same gracelessness (not replying to letters, phone calls and general evasiveness) of which he accuses politicians and government servants.

But this aside does not detract from the merits of his valuable contribution to the national development debate, even though the jury is still out on which development strategy — direct intervention or structural reform — will succeed in delivering the forgotten people of post-independence India’s failed development effort.

Dilip Thakore

Serious purpose

Dude, Where’s My Country? by Michael Moore; Warner Books; Price: Rs.200; 307 pp

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It’s not just that Moore has written best-selling books and made documentary films which have become box-office hits or done things that activists are supposed to do these days: fight corporates, the death penalty, and war. It’s that he’s done it all with a signature style of his own — like when he shouted his protest against the Iraq war during the 2002 Oscar academy awards ceremony. It was a spectacular prime-time individual protest against the war, at a time when the patriotic norm was to swim with the tide. Then, there’s his appearance: that of the Everyman — fat, sloppy, in baggy shirt and trousers — the polar opposite of the suave, well-groomed metrosexuals who dominate the media.

Moore’s latest documentary film, Fahrenheit 9-11, has smashed box office records on its way to making more than $100 million within the first few weeks of its release. Suddenly, people have woken up and are taking notice of Michael Moore. This is no fringe film-maker ranting about conspiracy theories. Moore can not only make good stuff, he can also sell it.

Dude, Where’s My Country is the literary version of Fahrenheit 9-11. The first few chapters deal with the response of the administration of President George W. Bush to the September 11 (2001) razing of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York by Islamic suicide bombers, and the background of Bush’s political life. Moore digs up interesting facts — on the Bush family’s long-term business dealings with the Bin Ladens and the Saudi royal family. He asks several questions of Bush: who really engineered the 9-11 attacks on America? Osama Bin Laden, an old man with failing kidneys stuck in a cave in Afghanistan, or some of Bush’s disgruntled Saudi friends? If, as the government claims, it was indeed Bin Laden, why were several of his relatives flown out of the country immediately after September 11 when no other flights were allowed?

While some of these questions have been asked before, Moore’s talent lies in squarely presenting the facts, detailing intricate (business) relationships coherently, while using a friendly, down-town tone all along. In fact, this is one reason Moore is likely to become the most popular anti-establishment figure of our time: he doesn’t hesitate to use teen slang, or even four-letter words. His prose is devoid of complicated terminology or obscure philosophical contemplation.

Apart from Bush-bashing, Moore doesn’t hesitate to tell Americans some other stark truths: that they created all the trouble in the first place; that people of oppressed countries across the world, such as Cambodia, Zaire, Indonesia, Brazil and others, owe their troubles to US governments committed to corporate control of these nations. Tin pot dictators are paid off to act in favour of vested multinational rather than local interests.

But Moore’s biggest virtue is that he realises the book shouldn’t keep hammering the same message; so he goes off at tangents, keeping the reader’s interest alive. There is, for instance, a chapter on his hypothetical conversation with his "great-granddaughter Ann Coulter Moore" set in the year 2054, in which he discusses the dark future of the human race after all oil has dried up. He takes a humourous route, but no one can miss the message.

Yet underlying such levity is a serious purpose. President Bush’s biggest support base is the Christian conservative crowd, so Moore makes sure the message gets to them: Bush does not speak for God. "I keep hearing him say that he is ‘acting’ on my ‘behalf’. Let’s get one thing straight: This guy does NOT speak for Me or anyone else up here. I do My own talking, or when I’m tired, I send down a prophet or two to do the yammering for Me. Once I sent My Son, but that just stirred up a shitstorm which still hasn’t died down."

That’s Michael Moore in essence: witty, irreverent, rebellious, unapologetic… but also humane. So when he says, "The War on Terror should not be a war on Afghanistan or Iraq or North Korea or Syria or Iran or whatever place we’ll end up invading. It should be a war on our own dark impulses", one can’t help but feel that there’s at least one person within America’s moral majority fighting on behalf of humanity.