Viscaino Reader

Plain Truths reading in Bangalore, July 2011

2011-09-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

Coverage, Times of India, July 2011, of my reading in Bangalore at the INK office.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-07-11/people/29758423_1_contract-killer-arun-kumar-poetry

My keynote speech at Ascend's conference, May 2010

2011-09-05T10:59:00.000-07:00

Ascend is an organization of Asian American professionals that aims to mentor and help such individuals advance in corporate America.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/6772031#utm_campaign=twitter.com&utm_source=6772031&utm_medium=social

Television Interview on Plain Truths, ITV New York

2011-02-19T16:03:00.000-08:00

My interview in December 2010 with ITV New York. Presented here in two parts. The interviewer is the charming Ashok Vyas who is a poet.

http://www.youtube.com/itvgold#p/u/37/zRYN38SLD0E

http://www.youtube.com/itvgold#p/u/36/iI-32g_yCOI

This third link is to an abbreviated version including an introduction.

http://www.youtube.com/itvgold#p/u/39/7UCgTHh6sWs

Plain Truths Reading, Mumbai, January 4, 2011

2011-02-19T15:33:00.001-08:00

A recording of my reading of my book Plain Truths, January 4, 2011 at Crossword Bookstore Kemps Corner, Mumbai.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_omiMHvWnU

An article carried by the Mercury News and other US papers on Plain Truths

2010-12-11T17:39:00.000-08:00

http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_16703002?nclick_check=1

The Hindu : Arts / Books : Balancing rhyme, metre

2010-08-09T14:00:00.000-07:00

The Hindu : Arts / Books : Balancing rhyme, metre

Nandan Nilekani: Imagining India

2009-04-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

In the opening chapter of Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India, The Idea of a Renewed Nation, (The Penguin Press, 2009), the author reminisces on a primary architect of modern India, Jawaharlal Nehru. As one belonging to the same generation as Nilekani, I relate to how Nehru’s vision shaped for our parents and thus for us the idea of a secular and democratic India. I too remember, as the author does, being taken by my father to see the great man when he arrived in my home town. The picture of the elegant leader, alighting from his Russian-gifted plane, poetically named the Meghdoot after Kalidasa’s play, remains in my memory.

At one level, Imagining India is in the tradition of Nehru’s Discovery of India. India is a nation based on ideas. Nehru, in his book, attempted to sweep the cobwebs off a colonized and de-energized India to define a nation, drawing inspiration from the greatness of its past and imprinting on it his own belief in science and modernity. Nilekani’s book is a vast survey of the debates and issues that have confronted India in its sixty years as an independent nation.

Where Nilekani parts course with Nehru is in his attitude to business and entrepreneurship. Unlike in Nehru’s day, entrepreneurship is celebrated in India today, and the author, a co-founder and now co-Chair of Infosys, is an icon of business success. Nehru’s central planning had resulted in a period of economic dirigisme that stifled business. The early gains of independent India in sowing the seeds for an industrial infrastructure and investments in science, technology and quality higher education were followed by years of stagnation.

I also found interesting Nilekani’s reference to Minoo Masani whose Our India, published in 1940, was an economics primer on India that caught the imagination of that generation. Interestingly, when Our India was first published, the average life span for Indians was a mere 27, now the average age of an Infosys employee. Masani who began as a socialist ended up as a votary of free enterprise. He presaged the path followed, in a measured manner, by Nehru’s successors since the reforms of 1991.

Imagining India is a conversation about India that progresses through a framework of ideas. Nilekani classifies the ideas into four trays: ideas that have arrived, ideas in progress, ideas in battle and ideas to anticipate. The author carefully lays out the context of each major idea and seemingly takes us to meet and converse with thoughtful people who have worked on many aspects of India.

Ideas that have arrived are ones that are not in dispute today although there had often been strongly divergent views in the past: perspectives on population, entrepreneurship, English, information technology, globalization and democracy. Thinking in these areas has moved from contention to consensus.

Population control was a subject on which the country saw swings to extremes, from a Health Minister who believed in abstinence to an obsessive implementation of “snipping” during the Emergency. Today, India’s young population is seen as valuable human capital capable of paying a demographic dividend. While the rest of the world has an ageing population, India’s youthful population presents a huge opportunity.

Entrepreneurship and an appreciation of the value of competition is another idea on which there is virtual consensus. Nilekani remarks on the transition that has occurred, exemplified by what he calls the transition from the Bombay Plan to Bombay House. The Bombay Plan, of which JRD Tata was a prime mover, was among the country’s first planning exercises. Initiated by a group of well intentioned business leaders before Independence, it was still imbued with a protectionist attitude. Today’s Bombay House, the headquarters of the Tata Group, exemplifies a new attitude to competition – where business leaders welcome the opening up of India’s markets and have the confidence and competence to venture into global markets.

Independent India had a hang-up in its attitude towards the English language, once resisted as the language of its colonial masters. Today there are few serious arguments heard in India against the value of English as an aid in progress and in national competitiveness. Today, English is seen as the language of upward mobility. India is in some ways remaking English for use in India. For this and other reasons, Thomas Babington Macaulay is probably turning in his grave. He had insisted on training Indians in the use of English to sustain British rule in India. Today, the largest private sector employer in the UK is India’s Tata Group.

Attitudes towards the use of computers and information technology have shifted from suspicion that they would displace jobs and livelihoods to their value in promoting growth and facilitating good governance. The impact of IT has spread, over the last decade particularly, into a number of areas including banking, railways and the conduct of elections.

Nilekani feels that the average Indian agrees that globalization is now good for India. The country’s psyche was clearly marked by its experience with the East India Company that came to trade but stayed to rule. Independent India’s leaders could not overcome that memory as they formulated India’s economic policies. In recent years, the country has made great progress in opening up its borders to commerce and ideas. Nilekani points out that globalization could deepen economic cleavages such as between the educated and the rest. To address these issues, it is important that access to education and resources be enhanced.

Ideas in progress, ones where consensus is gaining, are universal education, urbanization, infrastructure and a single-market view of India.

Until not too long ago, the idea of universal education was a difficult one when a child going to school meant a setback to the family’s meager income. However, today there is increasing demand for education even in the poorer sections of society. The challenge is in implementation – in making education truly accessible and ensuring that drop out rates are reduced. India lags China in making education available to all its citizens.

Mahatma Gandhi had declared that India lives in its villages and had advocated a village-centric approach to development. The realities are that employment is generated in the cities and India is seeing significant urban growth. The country needs more cities and the amenities to support them.

Along with an expansion in urbanization, India badly needs to address its roads and infrastructure. The Indian approach of infrastructure lagging growth contrasts with China’s supply driven approach. While India has a few successes like the Delhi Metro, overall this has been a difficult area, one where significant investment and progress is badly required. While there is increasing agreement on the importance of infrastructure, execution is lacking.

India as a populous subcontinent holds tremendous potential as one unified market. The potential benefits of this proposition are in reality diminished by tax policies and implementation especially where indirect taxes and interstate tax controls are concerned. A new focus on single-market synergies is promoting reform towards consistent national policies in this area.

The story “gets messy” when we reach ideas in battle. There are strong disagreements in India about affirmative action, labor laws and higher education.

Caste is a big factor in India’s elections where large sections of people vote their castes when they cast their votes. While there has been enormous empowerment of the Dalits, there isn’t widespread agreement on how much affirmative action is needed. Nilekani suggests that new economic freedoms will benefit the weaker communities more than state intervention.

Labor laws in India have created market distortions that provide protection only to a small organized sector but inhibit the expansion of employment and investment. Nilekani discusses how regulations have placed a glass ceiling on the economic potential of India’s workers.

In the last section, ideas to anticipate, Nilekani covers ideas that are not yet discussed adequately but should be. Included here are information technology for governance, public health and lifestyle, pensions and social insurance, environment and ecology, and the post-urban economy. The discussions in this section ranging from changes in health concerns from hunger to heart disease to issues of social security cover issues that have parallels in the United States. Indeed, Nilekani’s motivation is to explore how India can avoid some of these problems that affect affluent countries.

In addressing a holistic view of India, an area that Nilekani has decided to exclude is the area of foreign affairs. India is home to a sixth of humanity. Its neighborhood is a troubled one -- ringed as India is by unstable polities in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Sri Lanka. The country's foreign policy and attitudes will have a bearing on its domestic potential and progress. When and how, for instance, can the Indian subcontinental market be extended to encompass its neighbors and create a joint stake in peace and progress? A discussion of ideas to anticipate in this arena would have been worthwhile.

Overall, Nilekani suggests that India has a new tryst with destiny. The demographic dividend presented by a large young population is an opportunity on which India needs to act expeditiously. There is so much to do and it is mostly clear what needs to be done for India to reclaim its position as an important nation that once accounted for a significant part of the world’s GDP.

Imagining India is a forward looking book even as it carefully lays out the historical context of each subject the author tackles. It draws its energy from the potential that India holds and the author’s optimism. While the issues are weighty, the discussion is engaging, laced in good measure with humorous observation. One is left with a sense of awe for the sweep of Nilekani’s mind and for his passion to see India as a renewed nation.

Kishore Mahbubani: The New Asian Hemisphere, The Irresistable Shift of Global Power to the East

2008-08-27T20:33:00.000-07:00

February 22, 2008

A number of distinguished thinkers and commentators, among them Tom Friedman and Ed Luce, have recently written imporant books that may be considered to represent views of the West looking at the East, in particular India.

In Kishore Mahbubani, we have a strong voice looking in the opposite direction. Prof Mahbubani represents a rising Asia looking at the West.

Prof Mahbubani is dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. From 1971 to 2004 he served in the Singaporean Foreign Service, and ultimately was Singapore’s Ambassador to the United Nations. In that role he served as president of the UN Security Council in January 2001 and May 2002. His diplomatic career had taken him earlier to Cambodia (where he served during the war in 1973-74), Malaysia and Washington DC. He was Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Ministry from 1993 to 1998. Prof Mahbubani has also served on the boards of leading institutes and think tanks in Singapore. He was a fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University in 1991-92.

Prof Mahbubani is well known for his writings in journals such as Foreign Affairs and his books Can Asians Think? and Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust between America and the World. His articles have appeared in several leading journals and newspapers such as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

Prof Mahbubani’s latest book is The New Asian Hemisphere, The Irresistable Shift of Global Power to the East. I found the book engaging, erudite and sensible.

The subject of the shift of the locus of power seems to come to the fore every twenty years or so. Prof Mahbubani’s book reminded me of Jean Jacques Servan Schreiber’s works. Servan Schreiber was a multi dimensional man – journalist, press lord, politician – who touched a chord in Europe in the late sixties with his then celebrated book, The American Challenge. He led many Europeans and especially the French to think in terms of the importance of a European response to America’s dominant influence in the world of that day. In the eighties, Japan emerged as a big challenger on the world scene, and Servan Schreiber wrote The World Challenge which also touched presciently on the significance of what we now call digital technologies.

In 1985, Kenichi Ohmae published Triad Power, positing a world with three poles – America, Europe and Japan.

Professor Mahbubani’s new book introduces players who were not in the reckoning when Servan Schreiber and Ohmae wrote twenty years ago -- India and China. The New Asian Hemisphere is a book that should be of great interest to readers in both Asia and the West. These were countries however that dominated the world economy less than three hundred years ago – and their turn at the helm may well be coming up again.

Professor Mahbubani is known to be a bright and provocative scholar and diplomat. He has been described admiringly as a rare combination of gadfly and pillar of the establishment.

Ed Luce: In Spite of the Gods, The Strange Rise of Modern India

2007-05-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

March 2, 2007

Ed Luce has lived in many interesting places, in truly interesting times. He is currently the Washington Bureau Chief for the Financial Times of London. He was formerly the FT’s South Asia Bureau Chief based in Delhi. Ed earned a degree in politics, philosophy and economics at the University of Oxford; he earned a postgraduate degree in newspaper journalism at City University in London.

Along the way in his career, Ed had been a speechwriter to Larry Summers, Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration. On the subject of speech-writing, I heard the economist Mike Spence, the Stanford Nobel laureate, say that this profession is at risk in the US. He noted that political speechwriting is one of many activities being outsourced to India. Coming back to Larry Summers, one would think he would have been well served to have Ed help him when he moved on to Harvard.

For you will find extraordinary sensitivity in Ed’s book, In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India. He is compassionate and non-judgmental. He is never derisive or superior. Most of all I enjoyed his gentle humor which was reminiscent of RK Narayan. In Spite of the Gods is a best-seller in India. Just recently released in the US, it is already on the New York Times Non-Fiction Bestseller list, on the top ten of the Washington Post and on the recommended list of the Financial Times.

I have often wondered how one goes about writing a book on a subject like India. I heard a writer say that to ponder a vast and juicy subject is to be in the quandary of a mosquito in a nudist colony: where does one begin?

You will find that Ed has chosen his subjects judiciously and we are enriched with incisive insights and the tangible feel of a real India. Not many works can claim this accomplishment.
Many of the better works on India have been written by Indians who left India, literally or metaphorically. India seems to demand the perspective of distance and a certain intimacy of encounter. Nehru’s Discovery of India is the product of an individual who, as the title suggests, was “discovering” the country, indeed inventing a nation as he wrote from the isolation of a prison cell. Nirad Chaudhuri, who wrote The Continent of Circe, had distanced himself from the India immediately around him well before he physically exiled himself to Oxford. Shashi Tharoor’s Midnight to the Millennium, Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian, Sunil Khilnani’s The Idea of India and in earlier times Ved Mehta’s many books were written from afar.

Foreigners writing about India have had a mixed record. There was Katherine Mayo, in the 1920s, who wrote Mother India. Gandhi described that book as a drainage inspector’s report -- which may have been a little unfair. She attributed many of India’s ills to the people’s attitude to cows. Ed deals with the very same subject but with humor and insight. You should read about his visit to the Cow Research Institute! V S Naipaul’s reactions have ranged from an immature revulsion in his Area of Darkness to growing empathy as he got to his third India book, A Million Mutinies Now.

In contrast, in his sweep, understanding, empathy and critical objectivity, Ed brings us a book that complements the great AL Basham. Where Basham’s The Wonder That Was India dwelt on history and culture, Ed focuses on the here and now and the immediate future, on political, economic and societal challenges.

As you will discover in the early pages of his book, Ed would not neatly fit into the category of an Indian writing about India or a foreigner writing about India. For his wife Priya is Indian, and that makes him an Indian son-in-law. Sons in law have an honored place in India, at least everywhere in India except, trust my luck, Kerala…

Salman Rushdie: Shalimar the Clown

2006-02-25T10:36:00.000-08:00

Shalimar the Clown is a poem – a prose poem more epicurean in theme than epic in sweep. After Rushdie's East, West, he could well have titled this The Feast Wazwan.

The East and the feast is Boonyi, who tries to cross boundaries but is pushed back to where she came from. A modern day Anarkali whose husband turns anarchist. Boonyi deceives and is deceived. She underestimates Shalimar, her acrobat husband.

It is equally the story of the anarchist’s antithesis, Maximilian Ophuls, a hero of the French resistance who is rejected by the French but climbs the US establishment -- a scholar who becomes a power player, a steady flyer with a roving eye, a man of many talents who is at the core a weak man. Shalimar the Clown is the story of a Western man lusting for an Eastern woman, the encounter of a modern imperialist with an opportunistic Anarkali.

Shalimar is a single minded and a simple minded man. Whose sense of balance truly belongs only on the tight rope.

This is a story of climbers and of balancing and unbalancing acts – of the high brow Ophuls brought to earth by the low brow Shalimar in a bloody East West encounter.

And of Anarkali’s daughter, the lust-product of an earlier East West encounter, who finally takes down the anarchist. A daughter of Kashmir, she rejects India and becomes Kashmira.

The East and the feast is also Kashmir, a Kashmir before Freedom’s Midnight. The story ends with Kashmira’s midnight assertion of her mother’s power and the irony of a pure child of Kashmir felled by Kashmira in a foreign land. A story that draws the curtain on Midnight’s Children.

A story with no lessons but many insights, a film with more scenes than story, with the narcissism of the novelist playing on every page, of a magical and unrealistic nostalgia that can only come from the mind of a boarding school boy.

Reading List

2005-05-03T16:26:00.000-07:00

Here is a list made about three years ago -- a selection from my then bookshelf. I hade picked authors and subjects that I had particularly enjoyed, and among these authors I chose the works that I liked the most. I had confined myself to books that have connections with the subcontinent – with the exception of J.M. Coetzee. As I reflect on the list, I see that many have themes of expatriation and exile. I look forward to comments from those who have read books on this list, as well as to similar recommendations.

This list needs to be updated, including in the Friends and Family category where some exceptional new books need to be added.

By V.S. Naipaul:
A House for Mr. Biswas. Intensely moving story, leavened by humanity and humor, of a man's quest for a house of his own and for independence.
Letters Between a Father and Son. Correspondence between the now proud author, when he was a relative innocent, and his father who was “the best man that he knew”.

By J.M.Coetzee:
Waiting for the Barbarians. A brilliant novel about colonialism and what it does to the ruler and the ruled. Among the most brutal and disturbing novels I have read.
Disgrace. Another disturbing novel by the South African novelist, probing an individual’s dignity and degradation.

By Michael Ondaatje:
The English Patient. A book to be savored like a painting, crafted stroke by stroke. I preferred the book to the film.
Anil’s Ghost. Haunting story of an expatriate’s return to Sri Lanka and her troubling encounters with its present and past.

By Geoffrey Moorhouse:
Calcutta. May appear somewhat dated now; was my introduction to that charming and paradoxical city.
India Brittanica. A history of the English expatriate in India.

Straddling the subcontinent and England:
Shadow Lines, by Amitav Ghosh. A novel in which Calcutta, Dacca and London are artfully woven together in space, time and imagination.
The Buddha of Suburbia, by Hanif Kureishi. Featuring strange and goofy characters who nevertheless evoke our sympathy and humanity. I found the book better than the four hour long made-for-television film.
Reef, by Romesh Gunasekera. An elegant and simple novel of two contrasting homelands, the sunlit Sri Lanka and cold and gray England.

Straddling the subcontinent and America:
The Interpreter of Maladies, by Jhumpa Lahiri. A collection of short stories, including some especially good ones, that won a Pulitzer.

Spirituality:
The Art of Living, by the Dalai Lama. Teaches us that a fine single malt can give us pleasure but not joy. I greatly admire the Dalai Lama.

Friends and Family:
India: From Midnight to the Millennium, by Shashi Tharoor. A highly readable overview of India's transformation over the first fifty years of its independence.
The Five Dollar Smile, by Shashi Tharoor. Short stories – the titled story is my favorite.
Padmavati the Harlot, by Kamala Das. A collection of short stories – I especially like The Coroner. I am the protagonist of one of the stories, not revealing which. Kamala Das’s home in Bombay was a literary salon in the seventies, and virtually a second home for me.
Arranged Marriage, by Chitra Divakaruni. A plug for my poetry teacher! I took a poetry writing class with her ten years ago. This is a collection of her short stories.
Hangman’s Journal, by Shashi Warrier. Almost true story of the last hangman of Travancore.
Ayodhya Cantos, by Rukmini Bhaya Nair. Superbly crafted poems, mostly intellectual, highly relevant to our times.

2005-05-03T16:17:00.000-07:00

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