Khushwant Singh (1915-2014)

In 1978, Khushwant Singh wrote an article in the Illustrated Weekly of India, whose eminently successful editor he was, on the passing away of his father Sobha Singh. In 'On Losing a Parent' Khushwant Singh celebrated the fact that his father died nursing a scotch. 

I was 20 and drawn to every word he wrote. I penned him a short letter of condolence and posted the Inland letter care of the Times of India address on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg in Delhi. I ended the letter with a suggestion that since I could visualise how busy he must be, the letter need not be replied. In any event, given the state of postal service and the perception I had of 'celebrities' I was sure that no mail was ever likely to arrive in return. 

I promptly received a reply that ended with the exhortation for the Guru to shower his blessings upon me. After this, we exchanged a couple of mails and I finally met him in Delhi when he was the editor of 'New Delhi', a magazine that subsequently failed to respond to his Weekly magic. A little earlier, the management of the Weekly had ejected him and handed its reins over to the anti-septic M V Kamath, a move that drowned the iconic magazine without a trace. 

He was courteous and direct. We spent 15 minutes discussing this and that - surely completely inconsequential talk for him. A sample: "Which is the main tribe where you are in NEFA?" "Sir, Mishmi." Änd which religion do they follow?", he asked. I was stumped. "I don't think they follow any religion Sir." "That is very healthy.", he said very seriously.

He saw me off at the door of his office and left an indelible mark on my young mind. 

I met him again in 1999 and when I reminded him of that meeting, though he hesitatingly claimed to recall, I suspect he was only being nice.

Khushwant Singh has moved on. He was 99. He missed a century but I am certain a century or more will miss him. To me he was one of the most delightful human beings of our times, a real character who spoke his mind, courted controversy without fear and lived his life to the fullest. 

Light has just gone out of the Bulb. 

RIP Khushwant Singh (02 Feb 1915 - 20 Mar 2014).

 

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David and Goliath – Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants by Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell always makes for entertaining reading. He takes an idea – or two – and proceeds to demolish conventional wisdom built around it with a barrage of carefully selected statistics and persuasive anecdotal narrative. And there is a tantalizing element of self-help woven into the theory; remember the prescription of devoting 10000 hours to one’s chosen pursuit to reach the end of the rainbow, in Outliers? It is sociology’s pop version at its appealing best.

But does all he has to say stand rigorous scrutiny? The best that can be said is that the jury will always be out on some of his hypotheses. In the meanwhile, the believers and laymen like me will eagerly lap up his offerings. That is how his previous works ‘The Tipping Point’, ‘Blink’, Outliers’ and ‘What the Dog Saw’ were received and the book under review ‘David and Goliath’ has similarly found enough readers to scale every prominent Bestseller List.

The central theme of the book is that the ‘weak’ need not lose – indeed their disadvantages are not what they appear to be. It is entirely a question of understanding what an advantage or disadvantage really is, the limits that power of the strong has and following asymmetric tactics to grapple with such an adversary.
The book is built around these ideas and to me, at times it appeared that the stories are being forced to fit the theme; indeed some of the tales did not appear to have much to do with the core hypotheses. A case in point is the narrative of the insurgency in Northern Ireland and law and order in some of the badlands of urban America.

The books tilts at conventional logic and comes up with a few interesting and credible arguments. One is the proposition that contrary to common understanding of parents and educationists, small classrooms are necessarily not beneficial for its students. Indeed, Gladwell argues that lack of competition and peer support to weaker children militate against the desirability of small classes. There is a great deal to be said for the desirability of interaction among children and its value to education. Also, teachers of small classes do not automatically pay more attention to each student; human nature is to adapt and work less in such circumstances. Gladwell also points out that very large classroom are not beneficial either; they are chaotic and render children nameless and anonymous. He quotes figures from the performance of either variety to underscore his conclusions. A median strength is preferable, he says. Could it be about 25 children per class in the Indian conditions?

Similarly, the book argues that joining the more ‘prestigious’ schools and colleges is not always an advantage. There is a great deal to commend the theory that to be a large fish in a small pond does much more for the growth of an individual than to be reduced to being a small fish in the large pond of an elite college. A student who joins an Ivy League college on merit might soon find that in the new environment of heightened meritocracy, he or she is just an average player. Not only can self-esteem be a casualty, many students actually drop out of their preferred courses and take up other streams of education. The elite schools do more to ‘ássure’ wealthy parents that they are providing the ‘best’ possible education to their children that they do for the children themselves. Indeed, the end result could well be quite the opposite of the intended objective.

Gladwell also professes the applicability of the inverted U-curve in many situations where something that appears to be an advantage hits the law of diminishing returns and even becomes counter-productive over time or when pressed beyond a point. He gives examples of law-enforcement vis a vis application of stringent laws (as in the ‘Three Strikes’ law first introduced by the State of California to stem the tide of crime) as one of the examples.

Finally, if you need an occasional fix of pop-sociology and want to quell that desire to understand the way slices of our world function, I would recommend David and Goliath – Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants.

Incidentally, this was the first book I ever ‘heard’ through the earphones as I walked every morning. The experience was enjoyable and made the walks easier. But I did find that once in a while my mind tended to wander and had to be nudged back. Initially that bothered me till I reminded myself that even when I ‘read’ a book, my concentration is rarely a hundred percent!

The Siege by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark

Armies and security agencies the world over are in love with the phrase ‘lessons learnt’. Others too have embraced this expression whenever the need to forget our follies arises. After all, it has such a comforting ring to it, an assurance that we will not foul-up again and that while we may not have been wise in time in the past, we have pored over our errors with such sharp introspection that we need not worry about the future. And lest the less industrious have trouble digesting the syrup of our labour, we have reduced it to bullet points that lend themselves to adorning a single slide of a PowerPoint presentation.

Is this a frivolous introduction to the review of a very serious work that recounts a terror attack of most vicious kind that India – and most of the world – has ever seen? Perhaps not. Because what alarmed me most after I put down this remarkably researched book is the sickening realization that, arguably, we have done little or nothing since the attack that was called India’s 26/11, to repair the infirmities of our system.

The author duo has already been celebrated for their work ’Meadows’, an account of the kidnapping of ten Western backpackers in Kashmir by terrorists. The present work ’The Siege – The Attack on the Taj’ is another work of similar painstaking and meticulous research. Using credible sources, it reconstructs events right from the planning of the attack in Pakistan to the journey of the terrorists across the Arabian sea and the horrendous mayhem they inflicted on unarmed civilians in Taj, Cafe Leopold, the Chatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminus, the Chabad House where Jews lived and other places. The story is chilling in its rendition and every word rings of authentication.  This is a minute by minute account of the events; the mobile conversations between the terrorists and their handlers in Pakistan, the courage of a few unarmed and inadequately armed policemen, the great character shown by many including the manager of the hotel who lost his entire family and the failure of our decision making apparatus are among the many sub-plots that illuminate the narrative. A Note on the Sources in the end is most instructive.

Nearly 300 pages in length, it is an easy read. The authors mostly stick to reporting (brilliantly) and adopt a mostly non-judgmental approach that steers clear of pontificating.     

The book is highly recommended for everyone.