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Encounters
The subjects are all people whom the author, who had a distinguished service as a career diplomat, met in his official capacity. The write-ups are so brief that if one deducts descriptions of the circumstances in which he met them, there is very little left about the people in question. And if there are more Malayalis written about, it is because the author is a Malayali, whom the legendary diplomat K.P.S. Menon thought was a Tamil Brahmin and served him and his wife a typical vegetarian meal when they first met. He describes former President K.R. Narayanan as a nationalist and internationalist who did not erase his Kerala identity. Once, at Rashtrapati Bhavan, Narayanan broke down when he recalled that his sister had to give up schooling to save resources for his education. The master of indecisiveness as former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was known, he explained to the author the circumstances in which India had "abandoned plans for testing at the last minute" at the instance of President Bill Clinton. After the PM’s meeting with Clinton in 1994, "he did not think testing was necessary". This more or less confirms Rao telling US envoy Frank Wisner, "Tell your president, I keep my word". Sreenivasan has only praise for Inder Kumar Gujral, whose socialism does not come in the way of his elegant lifestyle. The ‘Gujral Doctrine’ – the idea of making unilateral concessions to neighbours – is invaluable, as no other doctrine to deal with our neighbours effectively has been evolved. For many US Congressmen and Senators, their regard for India stemmed from the way India treated Dalai Lama, who personifies divinity. "Only a great country could risk the wrath of China by giving refuge to the Tibetans", they felt. The author got an answer from the hugging mother, Mata Amritanandamayi, why she hugged everybody. "What else can a mother do to console her children?" She used to hug the sick and the infirm, but others felt deprived and so she decided to hug everyone who came to see her. Cuban leader Fidel Castro used to read a lot about Gurkhas, their valour and courage. When Sreenivasan accompanied an Indian dignitary, he told them: "Give me a 100 Gurkhas and I shall keep my neighbour under control". They pretended they did not know who the neighbour was. If Castro was agile, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was senile when the author saw him. Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara and his bete noire Sitiveni Rabuka of Fiji and King Tupou of Tonga figure in the book because the author served there and knew them well. He was "invited to leave" Fiji on account of India’s opposition to discrimination against Fiji Indians in 1989. Sreenivasan finds one thing common among Kurt Waldheim, Boutros Boutros Ghali, Javier Perez de Cuellar and Kofi Annan, who headed the UN. They all began as hot favourites of the US, who eventually fell out of favour. He has high hopes of Shashi Tharoor, who lost the UN election because he was identified too closely with Kofi Annan. He gives full marks to Mohamad ElBaradei, who heads the International Atomic Energy Agency, who is a Golf enthusiast. Similarly, he has only praise for J.N. Dixit, who had the wit to tell Pakistan President General Zia-ul-Haq that if the Indian envoys in Islamabad, Dhaka and Sri Lanka were just five feet something tall, it was because India did not want to project a big brother image in its neighbourhood. Maestro Mehta, as Zubin Mehta is known in Vienna, always carried with him chilli powder to add an Indian touch to his food. Three other Malayalis who are featured in the book are A.M. Nair, an associate of Netaji who set up a restaurant in Tokyo, V.K. Madhavan Kutty, a journalist among writers and a writer among journalists, and Professor Ayyappa Paniker, the T.S. Eliot of Malayalam, whose black humour in poetry and narration, had no parallels. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Indira Gandhi’s confidante D.P. Dhar, Prof Jagdish Bhagwati and US Congressman Stephen Solarz have also been portrayed. For those who know Sreenivasan’s subjects, the book is a delectable refresher; for others it is, perhaps, a bore.
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THIS is a book a colleague
found so boring that he refused to review it. But I found it so
interesting that I finished it in one go. This may be because I have met
some of the people whose sketches and pen portraits are included in this
anthology originally written as a column for an Internet portal.