Honoured a trifle late
By Chanchal Sarkar

HARVARD almost 40 years ago. Two very brilliant young Indian economists made life very pleasant with their laughter and badinage. Amartya Sen was then about 26 and Sukhomoy Chakravarty (who, sadly, died some years ago) must have been about the same age. They both had their wives with them and we met them quite a bit. Afew years before, Amartya was teaching at Jadavpur University. I was then looking after the edit page articles of The Statesman and sent him the annual report of ESCAP (then called ECAFE) for a review article which he did. It must have been child’s play to someone who only a few years later wrote from Delhi School of Economics his two-volume classic Choice and Welfare.

But one has to go a little beyond and before Amartya’s early years and schooling were in Santiniketan when Tagore’s aura still ruled. (Tagore was alive when Amartya was born in 1933; the poet died in 1941). In it was a philosophy and an attitude to life and values which, for those who wanted to imbibe them, were there to absorb. Amartya’s mother was apparently a little riled that in an interview (it must be the Hard Talk with Tim Sebastian of the BBC) Amartya did not mention Tagore as a formative influence. There was no need to. It was part of his breath and anyone reading his long article in the New York Review of Books will recognise that. The setting was right — an attractive place, a community where everyone knew each other, a residential atmosphere and plenty of talent — that was Santiniketan then. The university didn’t just concentrate on conventional subjects, there was art, music, drama and lots of literary meetings in the open air. Teachers and their homes were accessible.

Presidency College in Calcutta had its own ambience, not a rustic one but stimulating, with the cream of students from Bengal and very fine teachers. Cambridge on the other hand, was something of a village. Almost everything within walking distance, every one using cycles to go about. No one concerned about dress or fashion.

Out of all this Amartya has fashioned a most distinguished intellectual career. After Delhi, the London School of Economics, then Harvard University and now Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, with many honours along the way. I do not understand the mathematical deductions, the logical notations, the graphs and equations. I don’t understand what he meant in his theorem 337.2. All I know is that he analysed poverty, hunger, famine and inequality. Again this is in line with Tagore — the poet said there was much that Indians could teach the world, there was no need to go with a begging bowl to the West for everything. Amartya’s message and research were new and unlike what the Western economists were attempting. That is why he has been honoured — a trifle late — and that is why he will be remembered.

Not a book to remember

I am surely one of the last readers of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. And I must be one of the heretics when I say that I wasn’t shaken out of my chair. For one thing in a book I expect some action and The God of Small Things is slow, very slow. As for the language it is remarkable and it is Indian. English in name but the nuance is very Indian. Arundhati Roy is a good observer of Kerala and life there in its institutional and also its personal forms.

There is a picture of the infusion of politics into everyday life, the habits of people, their ways of speech. It is a book of great descriptions. But there is description of characters, no dissection. There is knowledge of Kerala life in the Kottayam region and the overwhelming shadow of caste, but I did not find it a book to remember. Nor did I see any reason for EMS phitoes is be incensed. There is very little about him.

Usefully yours

Divali presents can be so conventional. So much of them are sweets and dry fruits (which are fabulously expensive). But how can a family cope with boxes and boxes of sweets except to give them away to neighbours and friends? For me there was one exception, however. This year came a big box of motichhoors which were simply wonderful and laced with pistachoos and sliced nuts of various kinds. We enquired from the givers and were told that they were from Kanpur. I remembered the marvellous rabri and pethas that we used to get from friends in Agra.

Why can’t people think of gifts which could be useful and novel? A friend of ours, a Muslim entrepreneur, gives a present which is new every year: a special flask, a tray with receptables for nuts, a wall clock. A friend in Bombay who was head of Public Relations of a large chemical firm used to give every year a new metal article, a hammer to break ice, a receptable for pens and ball points, a snuffer out of candles and so on. After 15 or 20 years we still use them with gratitude.

The papers say that we are near a recession, that people had no spare cash to shop for Divali. I don’t know. Near our house a plaza is bustling with new shops. They have all encroached onto the common facilities like the courtyards and staircases with no one to dissuade them. Near there, Yusuf Sarai and Green Park become unpassable with shops colonising the roads.

The gift industry is strongly imitative and unimaginative. Afriend has just brought some gifts from the USA: bottle stoppers which enable one to retain the fizz of soda or other aereated drinks, cigarette lighters which we don’t make yet, pegs which can be stuck onto walls, spoon rests which can be of plastic, metal or porcelain, a shaker which could be used for cocktails or salad dressing. None of these are yet made in India. Apparently we still do not make a foolproof potato peeler. There is need for much more imagination and also the need to instruct our craftsmen on how to make useful things. Just go into a Japanese market and see the immense possibilities.

Aqua pura no more

What more shall we purify? The Municipal Corporation of Delhi’s water supply brought brown water every morning, and we were frightened thinking what it might contain. The filter removed some of the sediment and the filter candle grew dirtier and dirtier. So we had to go in for a water purifier, an electrical one. It is supposed to remove all bacteria as well. It didn’t come cheap and even after using it we put the water into the filter and we now get crystal-clear water. But what of people who cannot afford the electronic water purifier? What kind of water are they drinking every day?

Heart of darkness one never sees

By Adil Jussawalla

SALMAN Rushdie is given a phoney reprieve, Taslima Nasreen is in hiding in Dhaka, Wole Soyinka stays put in exile despite the amnesty offered to him and 14 others by the Nigerian government. All this happens around the same time, leading me to believe that there’s a cruel god deputed to look after exile affairs, making them play musical chairs as he is doing now, or if it suits his whim, getting them executed at the touch of a button. Let’s make no mistake about it. The threat that hangs over these three people and so many more in the world is nothing less than that of execution.

So it’s premature to applaud the liberalising trends in Iran, Bangladesh and Nigeria. In the circumstances they are under, freedom is a joke to Salman, Nasreen and Soyinka. And if there are millions of Indians for whom freedom is not a joke, it’s because it never came to them at all.

A writer friend who spent some time in the Dang region of Gujarat recently, described to me the sight of women gathering firewood and carrying it all day. They walk miles to gather the wood and miles to sell it, their heavy loads sprawled on their heads like lazy, multi-limbed rajas. It’s the only life they know. Everyone who went to a hill-station this summer must have seen similar women at their work.

There are Indians who haven’t seen a car or a film in their lives, there are others who have to move from place to place in search of dwindling supplies of water. Yet, reading our papers you wouldn’t guess this, you wouldn’t see this heart of darkness because of the lights — spotlights, flashlights, city lights trying to dazzle us with the illusion that the cities we live in are replicas of New York, Los Angeles or Las Vegas. High divorce rate? We have it. Early burn-out? We have it. Drug abuse among models? We have it. What we have that they didn’t have is the best cuisine in the world. Lots of it.

That’s what we’re supposed to believe, I’m surprised, given the number of recipes and articles on food and restaurants that our papers carry, that our great middle-class hasn’t collectively thrown up or turned anorexic.

No use pretending that I don’t read anything that’s got to do with food. I do, I read a lot of it and sometimes read only things to do with food. But the spread’s got out of control. It’s not even a feast anymore, it’s a meaningless, mindless splurge.

Which editor will purge the splurge?

If Ross Perot tells us that the behaviour of the President of the United States is like that of a cocaine addict, what would he say of our addiction to reading about food? What would one of our psychotherapists say? I shudder to think. All the ones I know are foodies.

It’s a global phenomenon too — this obsession with food and restaurants. In the ghastliest of taste an American publisher has brought out a book of recipes of what the passengers of the Titanic ate, just before the ship went down. (First class passengers presumably, not steerage). It won’t require the nightmare of possible execution to be over before someone decides to publish the recipes of Salman’s, Nasreen’s and Soyinka’s favourite meals while they were in hiding.

I know what I would say if I were asked. A bowlful of porridge. Which I would personally prepare under the prospective publisher’s nose before flinging it, steaming hot, into his face. — ANF