Rao and Column

Flowery prose and business writing are not natural allies just as poetry and commerce do not sit together....

Flowery prose and business writing are not natural allies just as poetry and commerce do not sit together. Jaithirth Jerry Raos Notes from an Indian Conservative makes you wonder whether,at the core,the author is a creative wordsmith who became a business leader or the other way around. Those who know Jerry will admire the complete man,who has his left and right sides of the brain communicating seamlessly.

Some writers plan their columns around a theme,intending to compile them into a book. After all,1,000 words per column,over 50 columns,do provide a decent hardback,which can retail for Rs 395. Jerry Rao is not one of them. He wrote his columns in The Indian Express from October 2004 with the gay abandon of a dilettante,who extracted his pleasure from each piece. The range of his subjects is as wide as the Ganga at Patna,but the material has been retro-arranged as a coherent volume,worth its weight and cover price.

Jerry has a view on many things from literary matters to Indian economics to caste. People of his career profile and age group do not write like him. His writing sometimes comes through as irreverent,iconoclastic,provocative and more. He peers at his subjects,he sneers at what he observes,but he never fears to ask. The obvious quality of his erudition,the command he has over the language,the subtle turns of phrase and the rich canopy of his quotes,all make his book an object to possess and to enjoy periodically,much like a bottle of single malt.

He is a Kannada-speaking,Tamil-familiar,Carnatic music-loving Madhwa,who is frank in expressing why he was relieved to leave Madras in 1971. TamBrahm pomposity and garish Dravidian cut-outs represented to me a parochial and avoidable combination, he writes. Thanks to Aruna Sairam,he enjoyed Carnatic music in the ever hot Chennai. His description of the winter days seeps through the pages with lyricism. He contrasts the packed concert rooms to the philistine Delhi,where even with the distribution of free passes,great artistes find half-empty halls.

It is uncommon for a person born after Independence to write In Praise of Thomas Macaulay yes,the same Macaulay,who was a member of the Sati-banning governor-general Lord William Bentincks council. Praise for what? For being the most important founding father of modern India by insisting on adopting English as the language for education in India. Jerry also researched Hansard to discover that there is no truth in an e-mail that is doing the rounds these days: that Macaulay had made a statement that English should be introduced to break the spirit of the natives. It is such meticulous attention to detail that makes Jerry an author to be treated with seriousness,though he writes with a self-deprecatory style.

On Christmas Day,2004,he visited the Nilgiris. He despaired about the plastic waste that was spoiling the pristine mountains. He innocently suggested that we can mix the strands and the sheets of plastic with gravel and asphalt to build roads. What do we read five years later? Ahmed Khan of Bangalore has built 1,200 km of road using,hold your breath,3,500 tonnes of plastic waste from landfills. It is green and it also makes better roads. Such roads withstand monsoons and everyday wear better than the traditional pavement, reported the International Herald Tribune. Was Jerry clairvoyant or did he actually know about the possibility? Either way,he must be smart.

He has written about the late Freddie Mehta in very endearing and accurate terms. Recalling Freddie,Jerry writes,History was a passion. What if the Surat Congress had taken a different turn? What if Gokhale had lived longer? I could picture my former colleague in an animated discussion in the directors lunch room at Bombay House,where he regaled us with such questions and offered debatable,sometimes controversial,answers.

Story continues below this ad

Jerry is an IIM alumnus,a successful banker,an equally successful entrepreneur and a whole lot more. Despite growing up in the rhetoric of the licence raj,as I did,he kept his tryst with free enterprise and his faith in voluntary social action rather than government actions. An interventionist state will sooner or later become a tyrant state. A minimalist state is always the preferred option, writes the avowed conservative.

After a conversation with The Indian Express editor-in-chief Shekhar Gupta,Jerry was asked,If you feel so strongly,why dont you write a column? Over the next five years,Jerry offered a determined and sustained response to that invitation. The subsequent re-arrangement of the columns under wide-ranging subjects has brought a very worthwhile book to the discerning reader.

The writer is executive director,Tata Sons