Metaphors in the East

It is clearly written with a western audience in mind (nothing wrong with that, I suppose) but it gets a bit irritating when sights, sounds and smells are overdescribed, and simple points laboured. For people who know their Mahatma from their Feroze Gandhi, the irrita-tion creeps in pretty quickly. Actually, there is a lot of English writing by Indians these days, well-crafted for an international audience, that is truly world class. Such writing often offers in-sights that are missed by op-ed columnists and journalists in India.

But not this book. The descriptions, the choice of cities and places are treated as metaphors for sweeping big picture generali-sations; for example, it is Allahabad for the Gandhis, Nehrus and Democracy, Bollywood for India Shining and Afghanistan for Jihad Globalised. But these journeys end up as re-cent history and literature in a tearing hurry.

The bit about Allahabad, for example, when the campaign for the elections in 1999 (which incidentally, the author refers to as the general elections of 2000) is described in tedious detail is again, simplistically at that, sneering at how democracy plays itself out. He attempts to tell all about Gandhi, Nehru’s great vision for a modern India, etc. without really pausing to string it into any thought, perspective or even reflection. The travelogue lurches from Alla-habad to Ayodhya and then to Mahesh Bhatt’s office, where the author’s encounters with Mallika Sherawat and a wannabe star, Pravin, seem to serve no purpose at all, or add to any-thing about how India could be at the cusp of Change — with a capital C.

The book does get better in Part II when the author talks about Kashmir, Afghanistan, his travels and travails there when he encounters Peshawar—post-Cold War. Though many might think his dismissal of Peshawar as a “mess” is a bit unfair. But his honesty when he describes the Muslim aggression in a De-oband- inspired madrasa in Pakistan (com-plete with marble flooring, muscle and atti-tude) as opposed to the original one in western UP does suggest an attempt on the author’s part to redeem at least a part of the promise he makes in the prologue—to try and make sense of the subcontinent’s encounters with the West in recent years.

Part III of the book deals with Nepal and Ti-bet. Nepal reads a bit dated, short and superfi-cial, and Tibet a bit strange. It is as if there are a lot of fundamental points the author wants to make on the Chinese way of winning markets of middle-class consumers (and more con-sumers) and what he calls the Tibetan way of infusing religion into their politics and way of life in a way that is not abrasive. However, such little attention is devoted to such a grand theme that it is left incomplete and lets the reader down.

All in all, butter chicken and MTV threaten-ing to change the Indian landscape in fin de siecle India was a trend that could have been dealt with in the author’s trademark style, as not much had taken root or shape. But 15 years down the liberalisation road in an aspiring, restless 1.1 billion strong India—located in a rocky neighbourhood—the reader expects much more. Butter chicken is seriously threat-ened by a mean ‘Chowmein’, and delicious hot Patties — at dhabas in 21st century India.