Desicritics Author: Kini

Blog to Blog Exchange: The Journey Begins - From Delhi to London

Kini — Thu, 8 Feb 2007 06:31:12 EST

This article forms part of an exciting Blog to Blog (B2B) exchange of reminiscences of the mid 1960s that both G.V. Krishnan, now an eminent, retired journalist, and T.R. Kini (Ken) shared.
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GVK, your account of transiting through Kabul of the 60s is gripping. One sees in one's mind's eye, an Indiana Jones tableau of a polyglot bazaar, teeming with scheming money changers, bandookwallas, local Mafia godfathers, European hippies hunched over steaming tea cups in dark cavernous teashops, rows of run down buses parked cheek by jowl. I overstate my Indiana Jones sinister perspective. A Delhi friend of mine who worked in Kabul for a couple of years in the 60s did describe it as a University town with a dusty dignity of its own.

I have a confession to make! I never made it to Afghanistan on my way to London by road. My companion and I travelled on what seemed like a never ending train journey that took the better part of two days and nights from Quetta in Pakistan to Zahedan in Iran.

This is how it all began.

As a junior reporter on my first job in the sumptuous wilderness of New Delhi I was sent to interview a young man called Irshad Panjatan by my Chief Reporter Om Narayan, a smart if laid back Uttar Pradesh character. For those of you who do not know, Irshad Panjatan was a uniquely gifted mime artiste in the mould of Marcel Marceaux. He had hitchhiked all the way from New Delhi to London via Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Italy and France and Germany. Irshad earned money by performing his unique art of mime in local schools and colleges. He had an easy time traversing half the globe both ways, getting written about and interviewed by local newspapers along the way and had a bulging Press cuttings folder to prove it. His audience realised that mime broke through the boundaries of language and indeed needed no language to communicate. He seemed to be in good health, none the worse for the months he had spent on the road with a rucksack on his back. He even offered to write to his brother in Anakara (in Turkey) - an economist seconded by the UN to the Turkish Government - offering us an interim shelter and care.

Here was my dream ticket to Paris and London! I had no special skills that would earn me my keep. I was 21, reckless in spirit and burned with ambition to be a great writer supping with the likes of Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Andre Gide, Andre Malraux and James Baldwin on the left bank of the Seine. Who knows, I might even end up marrying Francoise Sagan who shot to international fame with her slim 100 page novels: Bonjour Tristessse (Good Morning Sadness) and Un Certain Sourire (A Certain Smile).

Just repeating the names of these novels sent shivers up my spine. I used to boast that I knew every street of Paris like a lit up map of this great metropolis in my head. No one could stop me now. I had to lay my plans so carefully that even my parents would not hear of my departure until I was safely ensconced in a garret in the Vth Arrondissement, overlooking Notre Dame.

For a while it seemed fate had its own interventionist strategies. I was struck down with jaundice which turned my eyes bright canary yellow, and sent my body temperature in to high Fahrenheit numbers. I was in bed for a month, eating saltless, spiceless bland bowls of gruel. I brain fevered at night with scenes of my planned Odyssey. As soon as I could stand, I was back planning my solo departure for Europe. A kind friend, cartoonist O.V.Vijayan insisted I move in with him in to his Defence Colony bungalow under his watchful eye and rest and recuperate. Another well connected friend Najmul Hasan, an elegant cultured Aligarh scholar turned journalist, offered to help me get my visas since he knew the Consuls in respective embassies and it would be a doddle if he were to take me along.

Years after my hitch hiking adventure I let everyone believe that I carried my clothes and accessories in a glamorous rucksack. In fact, I bought myself the largest suitcase I could find in one of the pavement shops in Connaught Circus, cast in a black plasticised cardboard-like material to help me take a cargo of all my favourite books (The Serpent & The Rope by Raja Rao; the Lawrence Durrel trilogy; Collected Short Stories of Nabokov; Faulkner, William Styron, Norman Mailer oeuvres; Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, the list goes on). I also planned on taking a thousand pages of my own yet unpublished writings and my correspondence with several well known writers and friends. I had little by way of tinned food, attractive items like Gillette blades which would have been eminently exchangeable for cash on the way.)

Fate intervened again in the shape of Subhash Chopra, then a reporter for Indian Express, later an eminent journalist. I had just attended a press conference for some new venture and was waiting for my bus in the dark to take me back to the Fleet street of New Delhi and found Subhash waiting for the same bus as our respective newspapers were in adjacent buildings. When I mentioned to Subhash that I was packed and ready to leave for Europe by road with just three UK pounds' worth of Forex cash, a trunk full of books and a crazy dream in my head, Subhash was virtually trembling.

He made a request that I delay my departure by a couple of weeks so that he could get his parents' permission and blessings to accompany me and cancel his pre-planned easy route by boat to Genoa or Marseilles and a train journey to London. Prudently he even had a UK work permit and visa. I was not averse to having a companion and did not realise then that without Subhash, I would not have survived the journey, as my skinny arms were too frail to carry a massive case all the way to Europe with no money and all the hazards.

I still remember the crisp spring day at New Delhi train station when some 50 friends and well wisher acquaintances turned up to send us off on the first leg of our journey. I still feel tears pricking my eyes as I remember the faces: Atul Cowshish a Statesman reporter, who shared the room with me when I was bed ridden with jaundice; Anil Saari, the poet and cine theorist; O.V.Vijayan, Krishnan Dubey, Hindi journalist; Cecil Victor, fellow reporter and a multitude of Subhash's friends.

I believe there was even a note from Nirad Chaudhuri wishing me well (I had got to know him), but I never saw it. Some one had kindly paid for two train tickets from Delhi to Wagah border with Pakistan, from where we assumed we would commence relying on the goodwill of passing lorries and cars to take us deeper and deeper in to our journey and nearer to our destination. We were just not prepared for what was in store for us at the India-Pakistan border, at Wagah.

GVK, follow that!

Book Review: Hacks and Headlines- Rashme Sehgal's First Novel

Kini — Thu, 1 Feb 2007 14:19:32 EST

Rashme Sehgal's first novel is not just a heady mixture of political and sexual power games, it is an insider's view of the way the fourth estate operates in India, ideally placed in New Delhi where all the power broking goes on behind closed doors. It shows that the Indian media owners are complicit in these corrupt machinations. Rashme Sehgal is a successful journalist who worked at several major Delhi based newspapers and, for two decades, she has had a ringside seat at the arenas of events she describes.

The novel begins chillingly with the public execution of an upper class girl, Paro, and of her lower caste lover Jano by their relatives, with the witnessing village remaining complicity silent. There is no intricate social explanation of this gruesome event: the indifferent witnessing of the entire village is shown to be ordinary. The description of these murders is almost banal, the sentences are staccato and short, as if the music had suddenly stopped. This however is a deliberate device and sets the tone for the rest of the novel.

The news of these brutal murders is routinely reported by Dalip Jha, a veteran Delhi-based reporter for a Calcutta paper. Media baron Vikram Aggarwal who owns the rival The Indian Sentinel and whose family's financial dealings are under investigation uses this as an opportunity to hijack the story and ultimately engineer the downfall of the coalition government, providing a pretext to install his own uncle as the new prime minister. However the premise that these media barons can overturn a unstable coalition government is moot

There is a veritable cavalcade of characters: a number of politicians including a Prime Minister, a Chief Minister of U.P., their kleptocrat lackeys, a large gaggle of journalists (hacks) that includes a fine portrait of rapacious reporter Raveena Bedi, all of them driven by an insatiable desire to further their career by any means; Kiplingesque Gulabo Pathan, a Mafia god father stranded in his old Delhi fastness, much diminished by age and illness; Ram Bharose, his duplicitous acolyte, a hired assassin ; Attar Singh a small-time money lender who gets caught in the web, various family members and minor characters with the ultimate flotsam represented by office peons and finally by the villagers themselves.

There is a moral vacuum enveloping almost all the characters. Cynicism and pervasive corruption dictates the conduct of almost all of them. There is an unanswerable moral argument for the reinstatement of public and private morality raging unspoken between the lines.

There is a much larger novel almost echoing A Suitable Boy in tone and mood, which has been sadly abandoned in favour of a much shorter fictional précis. It is a pity that often a fine novel like Hacks and Headlines has to bear the burden of such high expectations placed on it since the Pulitzer Prize Winner work by Jhumpa Lahiri and the Booker Prize won by Arundhati Roy for her first novel. It is also significant that a substantial number of new young writers based in India are publishing promising work. It is a challenging gauntlet for Rashme Sehgal to run.

An earlier pre-publication review went on to allege that "this novel seldom rises above the hack writing which it condemns, and the deadpan realism never quite takes off." This is an unfounded criticism. This is similar to accusing that A Catcher in the Rye fails to rise above an adolescent monotone. The critic fails to see how clever the stylistic device is in using often the exhausted phraseology of hack writing. Hence phrases like, "radiant with energy"; "her provocative smile"; "eyes shone with a rare intensity" proliferate with a deliberate precision. Media demotic suits the theme of the novel well.

Rashme Sehgal is right in deliberately choosing to use a succession of "trite" idioms to describe a talentless mediocre bunch of kleptocrats, and an accompanying culture of two track morals (public euphemisms of declarations of honour and honesty and private corruption) that goes from the top to the very roots of public and private conduct. Demonstrably, the fear that deliberate triteness might undermine the whole novel turns out to be unfounded.

Rashme Sehgal's prose is marvellously crisp and moves at a lithe and efficient pace, in the process illuminating the fine details. It is astonishing to realise how each character gets a cursorily bare physiognomic inspection/description, and yet the few deft words engrave each of them vividly.

Here are a few deft portraits drawn no doubt from real life: There is concupiscent Dalip Jha, the veteran reporter unctuously seeking to "mount" (a surprisingly archaic word) his younger female colleagues where ever he can find such solace. He is a lovable, ultimately vulnerable philanderer who is trying to find sex in a setting of peaceful domesticity. When he is discovered by his wife Seema in his new found sexual partner Kiki's flat, the mood is any thing but erotic, with Dalip deep in reading the daily newspapers in a moment of post-coital domesticity.

There is petulant Seema, Dalip's third wife who takes Dalip on a white knuckle ride by making false accusations against him and his family of demanding a dowry (which is illegal), in an electrifying episode. On a grander scale Leelawati, Chief Minister of an Indian state with her orchestrated entourage deserves a fictional Bollywood Oscar. She is meticulously described as a gross but exact thespian caricature on an epic feeding and self grooming frenzy for status and power and money.

Another dominating character adding a demonic dimension to the story is Kala Muthu. He is a self assured and thrusting young buck from Chennai. He weaves his way through the Delhi elite and proves himself to be an adept blackmailer whose sole ruthless ambition is furthering his career with a bold prowess in bed and knowing when to strike.

A memorably smoky New Delhi is the magical backdrop to this mini saga, with its salubrious villas shrouded in an explosion of bougainvilleas; the description alludes to the borderland between the old parts of Delhi separated by a Mughal gate where stall keepers hold their posts right through day and night even during bone chilling winters. This provides a meeting ground for night workers, money lenders, assassins for hire, informers, corporate spies, impecunious office workers and young reporters on night watch.

The front cover predictably shows a stack of newspapers with the words "a novel" quirkily turned upside down disrupting an otherwise acceptable design. The back page blurb thoughtlessly gives away the final outcome of the novel, if not the gory event that precedes it. Although the book's title is accurate in affirming the central role that hacks and headlines occupy in the novel, a better title, less precise but more evocative could have been found. One assumes that the editors of Indian publishing houses do not go for the traditional handholding and nurturing of their authors to alleviate their self doubt and sinking morale.

One is left yearning to know how some of the characters got on: Dalip Jha and Seema and their tempestuous marriage; Raveena with her insatiable appetite for power and sex; Rajan's wife Arati, a narcissistic socialite and Rajan, a Chanakya-like character closest to Vikram Aggarwal; the media Mughal himself always sunk in a reverie; Ajay Singh, the idealistic and talented Hindi journalist who sacrifices his career on a matter of principle; predatory Kalu Mutu, the ruthless self promoter, and sundry characters.

One hopes there is a powerful sequel with a redemptive message for the corrupt soul of Indian body politic.