The problem with the Left Front leaders is that most of them incite their party cadres to take the law into their own hands, little realising that, as the party in power, they have greater responsibility to help the Election Commission conduct free and fair elections. The observers say that they are unable to work freely and independently due to the lack of adequate protection. This is too serious a charge against the government to be viewed lightly. It should tighten the security for the observers and extend all possible cooperation to them till the completion of the poll process.

In a sense, most of what the book says is known. What it, however, does is to quote chapter and verse in support of the argument which the author builds up. That the scale of operations was really large should be clear from some of the figures which he quotes. In 1857, there were 30,000 Punjabis in the Indian Army. By June 1858, a year later, the strength had risen to 80,000 troops. Of them, 75,000 were Punjabis; the Sikhs alone numbered 23,000.

One explanation is well known. During the Mutiny, the Sikhs had helped the British and, therefore, the British rulers decided to involve them more and more in their scheme of things. In world War-I, 56 per cent of the combatants were Punjabis and the Sikhs constituted 26 per cent out of them. The entire book is loaded with figures of all kinds. I have seldom come across a book which gives facts and figures in such an abundant and convincing manner. As a study of the problem, therefore, nothing has been left to chance and the author has done a first-rate job!

Without going into further details, one thing that kept on bothering me all the time when I was reading it was: why did not even one academic in any of the Punjab universities come forward and do this kind of analysis? In my opinion, this issue cannot be pushed under the carpet as some defenders of the academic establishment would like to be done.

Foreign scholars are writing about India all the time and now even non-Punjabis find Punjab a comparatively neglected area of study and venture into it. There is no clear answer to this question, therefore, except the obvious one that, over the decades, Punjab has allowed its universities to degenerate into dens of mediocrity. It goes without saying that the tradition of research in Punjab’s universities, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences, is weak or absent or both. Whatever be the truth, it is a matter of serious concern, most of all for those who deal with policy making.

In the course of the book, the author has given a brief history of the Indian Army, the post-1857 repression, the Russian threat, and the “martial race” theory. Most of it would fall under the heading of the administrative and policy assumptions on the basis of which the Indian Army was reorganised and how the Punjabi share began to grow. Lord Roberts, for example, with his widely known book, “Forty-one Years in India,” preferred Gorkhas, Sikhs, Dogras and select Muslims to constitute the bulk of the army and made no secret of his views.

Since the Russian threat was also a factor, the British were smart enough to build the Grand Trunk Road as soon as they captured power in Punjab. They got down to this job immediately after the annexation in 1849. To be precise, the road to Peshawar had been completed by 1853; that is to say, four years after the annexation of Punjab and four years before the Mutiny. Meanwhile, the telegraph lines had also been laid and both these technical innovations played a notable role in the way the British organised a counter-attack on Delhi.

Without going into further details, two additional things may be said. One is that beginning with the eighties of the 19th century and till World War-I, the entire revenue expenditure on the army in India was approximately 50 per cent of the total outlay and a good deal of it was spent in Punjab. Secondly, in 1971, to quote the author again, the Northwestern Railway constituted 23 per cent of the total railway system in India. In the preceding half a century, the capital expenditure on the railways had increased by 7-800 per cent. All this data is given in the book and it is to the credit of the author that he has done a thorough and masterly job.

The issue before the author was: What impact did the Punjabisation of the Indian Army have on the making of Punjab? The brief answer to it is that 50 per cent of the total “effective” expenditure by the Government of India was on the soldiers’ pay. This in turn leads him to analyse the impact of the changing food habits, the growth of domestic facilities and various other things which go with an increased income. The commercialisation of Punjab’s agriculture, which took place unmistakably during these years, was a part of what was happening.

A question which the author poses is: How was the thinking of people in Punjab affected by what was happening? This in turn leads him to go into the details of army recruitment, the preferential employment given to them and, above all, the preventive legislation that was adopted even when, in certain cases, the local government had to be overruled. This happened in the early 20th century.

As most students of Punjab would recall, the early years of the 20th century in Punjab were somewhat disturbed. There was a spurt of agitation in which Lala Lajpat Rai and Sardar Kishan Singh (father of Bhagat Singh) figured prominently. Before that, the Land Alienation Act had been adopted in 1901. This Act gave extraordinary protection to the land-owners. Indeed, it was so extraordinary that when the same system was sought to be applied to other states in the country — Maharashtra, for example — it could not be done. The local complications were much too many and the attempt was given up.

The state of Punjab, however, was a different proposition. It was a favourite of the British rulers. To quote the author again, the amount of pension distributed in Amritsar district about the time the Jalianwala Bagh incident took place was approximately two-thirds of the revenue raised from there.

In return, those who joined the army gave ample evidence of their loyalty so much so that, in the decade of the twenties, when soldiers had been demobbed, the prices were rising and the epidemic of influenza had taken a heavy toll, the bulk of the peasantry still remained loyal to the Raj. Without going into further detail, the author sums it up by saying that the “Punjabisation of India had restrained colonialism and restricted nationalism.”

These two propositions are illustrated in detail by the manner in which provincial diarchy was introduced in the early twenties and the Unionist Party emerged as a dominant political force. As a matter of fact, this very party continued to be in power till early 1947, a few months before Partition took place.

It was none of the job of the author to go into the causes of Partition or any such thing. But it seems the author, more or less, stops short in his analysis of Punjab by the early 20th century and does not cover the decades of the thirties and the forties. While it is possible to defend this kind of summary treatment given to the last two decades of the Raj as being somewhat logical, the book might have gained in the depth of its analysis had these two decades been also covered. It should not be forgotten that the Sikhs, once awakened and organised, became a political force after 1925 and moved away from the Raj to no small extent.

The litany ran: “While sitting down on a table you never dragged your chair”, but “lifted it”. If there was a “lady by your side you had to pull her chair back before you sat down yourself”. Same ritual was to be followed at the conclusion of the charade. A mixture of the opposite sexes was to be regularly interspersed in the seating arrangement. The table talk had to be “light, polite, almost inaudible” instead of a babel of tongues. The sound of the interplay of cutlery was supposed to be louder than the humming of conversation. It had to be above all a “decent conversation”...so on and so forth.

We had to take the family of cutlery too seriously. There was the important commandment of not lifting the knife above the plate. It was the fork which carried the food to the mouth. The knife was supposed to cut the larger portions into smaller morsels and was not meant to escort food to the mouth. Some of us who daringly carried the food on the knife earlier had to do a precarious balancing act totally oblivious of the affront to table manners. Additionally, there was a fear of cutting your tongue.

One often wondered why a person with reasonably agile fingers could not do a neater and safer job of eating the Indian way. But perhaps that was not to be. That was not a part of the training. I wish someday our academies will teach us how to eat better — Indian style.

We were demonstrated how a fish knife was different from a meat cutting knife, how a fruit knife was different from a butter knife. The difference between a dessert spoon, a soup spoon and a teaspoon was as vital as it was between a full plate, a half plate, a quarter plate and a saucer!

When it came down to glasses the differences were more mystifying — we often confused one with the other when the mixed family for imbibing whiskey, gin, brandy, cocktails, wine and champagne all found place on the same shelf. It was amazing to note that the bulbous brandy glasses were the largest in rotundity as one was supposed to warm the contents of the glass with the heat of one’s own hand. The smaller brand of liqueur glasses had their own place in the scheme of things.

Suddenly, everything has turned topsy-turvy for the 54-year old Nara Chandrababu Naidu, who, prior to the poll, looked the master of all he surveyed. The self-declared CEO of Andhra Pradesh Inc was so confident of a hat trick that he had advanced the Assembly poll by nearly eight months. But his game plan has gone awry with the party facing a massive defeat at the hustings.

What has gone wrong with the man, who has made a mark for himself as a modern political manager par excellence?

“I really can’t say anything at this point on why we lost so badly. Our defeat even in Hyderabad city, for which we have done so much, is astonishing,” a bewildered Naidu admitted.

He obviously misread the mood of the people, who were cut up with the TDP for ignoring the essentials such as irrigation, drinking water and unemployment. Caught in the web of his own hype, Naidu lost touch with the reality. His personalised style of functioning, where everybody else, including his Cabinet ministers, is a zero, stifled the party at all levels.

When T Devender Goud, a senior minister, openly admitted after the poll that all was not well for the TDP in the elections, an angry Naidu reprimanded him. Such is the control that he exercised over the party.

Naidu would probably blame his defeat on the Telanaga slogan, the Naxalite backing for the Opposition and the Congress promise of free power to the agriculture sector. While they indeed have played a role, it is people’s disillusionment with his policies that has really undone him.

Take the fact the TDP lost more seats in coastal Andhra, a traditional stronghold, where the Congress did not have a TRS as an ally. Even his own Rayalaseema region did not come to his rescue. And this after the entire Telugu film industry was deployed during the poll campaign to swing the voters in favour of the TDP.

The AP results have showed that political craftsmanship and micro management do not always ensure a victory in the elections.

Naidu’s credibility over the years took a beating as he gave a go-by to principles in favour of immediate political mileage. He effortlessly moved from being the kingmaker in the United Front government to being the crucial backer of the NDA government.

He completely reversed welfare policies such as rice and power subsidies that earned the party its social base. His economic reforms only resulted in higher power tariffs, and the focus on IT has not changed the life the commoner in any significant manner.

Despite all these, the voters returned his party in 1999 believing that he meant good for the people. But as Naidu got carried away by his own hype and started feeding the middle class fantasies ignoring the deprived sections, the party lost its moorings among large sections of the populace, including the farmers, the Dalits and the BCs.

His centralised style of functioning has few friends left for him within his own party. Most of the senior leaders in the party such as K Yerran Naidu harbour ill-will against Naidu for denying them berths in the NDA government.

Almost all of NTR’s family members are now up against him, as he had conveniently kept them at a distance. Dr D Venkateswara Rao, elder son-in-law of NTR, with whose help Naidu overthrew the patriarch of the party, will now be back in the Assembly as a Congress MLA and even probably as a minister, while his wife and NTR’s daughter Purandeswari is waiting for the results to be a Congress MP.

This defeat, of course, is not the end of Naidu and his party. Relatively young, Naidu is a long distance runner. Having won hands down in Kuppam in his native Chittoor district, Naidu will play the role of Opposition Leader to the hilt in the new assembly. He probably will have to refashion his politics and play to the gallery, but Naidu has it in him to bounce back.

Given the fact that the TDP is the fount of anti-Congressism in the state, it has a huge following even in defeat. And with TRS as an ally, a Congress government can be expected to provide enough fodder for the TDP to survive and even make a dent in the coming months.

There is a terrible design fault in men — their contempt for the familiar, their infatuation with the new. It happens the other way too but women are less likely to be attracted by the new than they are to become besotted by the way someone treats them as new.

From the woman's point of view, the true cancer of long-term relationships isn't infidelity or cruelty, it's indifference and neglect. When a woman has had a long time of being taken for granted by her partner, and feels placed in importance somewhere below his need for clean socks, it can be fatally tantalising to be found interesting again even if her only opinion is what's going to happen next in her favourite soap opera.

Women have been known to throw away relationships of many years' standing just to feel that way again - fascinating, mysterious, enchanting, amusing, new. Just like an acting troupe or a travelling circus, she gets tired of staying put trying to entice the same old tough audience and moves on to a new, much more appreciative crowd where just being herself inspires rapturous applause.

Compare and contrast with all those self-help books where even reading the titles makes you feel like climbing into the bath with an electrical appliance. Things like How to Survive Long-Term Relationships and How to Keep the Same Man Happy for the Rest of Your Life. These books always have chapters on the importance of `new', although they call it `retaining a sense of mystery'.

However, they never seem to have any good ideas about how to do it, just a lot of waffle about not talking too much, not giving too much away and ensuring that you're still capable of being surprising.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a shortage of uncommonly thick men around eager to fall for this kind of thing. I know when I've tried to exude a sense of mystery I've always been asked if I've got a tummy ache.

There also seems to be a limit to the amount of surprises a man can be expected to enjoy. A new hairdo is one thing, turning up with a whole new set of children quite another (`I got bored with the old lot, I thought we could do with a change'). It would seem that `retaining a sense of mystery' might be incompatible with daily life. How can you retain a sense of mystery when you're asking someone to pick up light bulbs from the shop?

That's the problem really - it's so boring and exhausting being exciting, but the only other way is to accept that sooner or later people are going to get used to you and eventually slightly tired of you, and the `new' thing will disappear forever.