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Category: Excerpts

The three critical rules of working as a consultant

Posted on by pagarwal

Management consulting is seen as a glamorous profession. But behind the mystique are the consultants who put in extraordinary effort, cultivate great problem-solving skills and display fine personal attributes to capture the attention and respect of their clients.

The Mind of a Consultant opens up that world to the readers through the story of Samantha Thomas, a character modelled on many excellent consultants, who gives us a glimpse of what goes on inside the mind of a consultant.

Here is an excerpt from when Samanta is an intern and learns the three critical rules of working as a consultant.

 

‘Is the presentation ready?’ Hamid was unapologetic in his question.

It was 2 a.m. Samanta had been working for more than eighteen hours straight on the presentation for the client leadership team that was to be presented the next day. She was expected to be part of the presenting team alongside Hamid, the project manager and partner who owned the account. Hamid was six years her senior and from the same institute she was attending. He was highly respected by his colleagues and the project team members looked to him for guidance.

She thought back over the past few weeks, remembering the first day she had arrived at Pinnacle for her internship. It was like a dream come true. Her first official day as an intern at Pinnacle. She, along with thirty-five fellow interns from some of the best management institutes in the world, had been participating in the internship orientation. Two of the senior partners and a few engagement managers who could make it were part of the two-day programme.

While partners spoke about the culture and the attributes of great consultants, the engagement managers were more operational. They spoke about the tools and the support that were available to interns. They shared Pinnacle’s knowledge base, along with templates for ppts and Excel sheets, which were life-savers for the interns when they started out.

At the end of the second day, the interns were provided with laptops and their project assignments. Samanta was assigned to a large organization-transformation project in the retail industry. The organization was exploring strategies to enhance growth and increase efficiency amid changing industry dynamics. Her project manager for the assignment was Hamid. At the time, Hamid was participating in more than half a dozen similar assignments worldwide. He was always up to date on the latest happenings in the industry and often considered an expert in the field.

The first time Samanta and Raghav, a fellow intern, met Hamid to work on the project, he came across as passionate and knowledgeable. It was obvious that he was an accomplished consultant.

‘I want you guys to challenge me,’ he told them. ‘it’s important that you get a head start and not waste time doing things that don’t matter to this project.’

He gave them presentations and materials to read, a brief on the client requirements and the names of some resources in the firm that he thought could be helpful.

‘Get ready to fly out tomorrow to meet the client,’ he said. ‘We’re having meetings with some of the key management team members before doing a few store visits to understand their set-up. You need to be up to speed on everything that we know about the client by then.’

One thing Samanta learnt from Day One was that consulting constantly needed one to learn and travel. That was the best part about being at Pinnacle. It treated its team members as star talent, and believed that its people could figure out a way to deliver on even the toughest assignments.

Samanta and Raghav spent their time leading up to their trip reading more on the retail industry in general and the company in particular. Pinnacle had some wonderful case studies and industry knowledge available that they found helpful. There were different terminology and business metrics that Samanta and Raghav had never encountered before, but Hamid encouraged them to learn all of it, and learn it well.

‘You don’t want to be seen as novices. You should be able to ask and understand questions in areas that are relevant even to the CEO.’

The following day, Samanta, Raghav and Hamid started on their trip to see the client. Samanta had been told that she was lucky to be doing her first project with Hamid, so she took advantage of the uninterrupted cab drive to ask him questions. there was one in particular she couldn’t help asking.

‘How did you earn so much respect from your peers?’

Hamid raised his eyebrow at her, a smile on his face. Samanta shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She was probably the first intern to ever ask him that.

Hamid gave a short laugh at her discomfort before answering. ‘How do you think, Sammy? And you too, Raghav.’ Samanta thought for a moment. There were several possible reasons, or, more likely, a combination of several of them.

Raghav chimed in first. ‘Maybe hard work? or domain knowledge?’

Samanta nodded. She had been thinking along the same lines. She added her own thoughts. ‘I would think project-management expertise would have something to do with it. Is that part of the reason?’

Hamid nodded and smiled. ‘All of those are correct, but there are three main rules I live by in this firm.’ he held up his fingers as he counted them off.

‘Rule 1: strive for knowledge.

‘Rule 2: build your best coalition.

‘Rule 3: Always be ahead of the client.

‘Each of these is critical when working as a consultant.’

—

The Mind of a Consultant hands you all the tools necessary to build a successful professional career in an easy-to-understand manner.

How infidelity unravels

Posted on by vidhi

Sometimes when you’re desperate to leave the past behind, the past is eager to catch up!

Anuradha leaves Gurgaon when Dhruv chooses his family over her. She thinks that chapter of her life has ended, and starts afresh in Mumbai. But strangely, it seems her past is trying to catch up. Dhruv suddenly comes back into her life. Even as they try to figure out their relationship, horrible things start happening to people they know. Together, Anuradha and Dhruv need to find out who it is that cannot bear to see them together. Who is carrying out these shocking crimes? Are they really soulmates cursed to stay apart, or is there some karmic debt they have to repay?

 

Read on for a look at the psychological aftermath  of an extra-marital affair

 

Only The Good Die Young | Akash Verma

Mumbai has unnerved me every single time I’ve set foot here in the last few months. It wasn’t like this before. It used to be like any other city. Just that I frequented it more as my advertising agency, C&M, is headquartered here. But now, since you have been here for about a year, coming to this city has never been the same. Work still brings me here—a couple of times a month at least—for a sales review or a client meeting. But every time I am here, I feel like running to you first, clasping you to my chest and not letting you go. Yes, that’s what I still feel, Anuradha, after pushing you so far away from my life. The first few months after you left were tough—to come to work each day with you not being in office; to live without you in Gurgaon; not hearing your voice; and not feeling your touch. Despite having Shalini and the kids back in my life, there was this one large gash in my heart. However hard I tried, it refused to heal. It stayed there, untended and bleeding. My head feels heavy with the weight of a sack inside it.. ‘“Don’t do it!” didn’t we warn you?’ the pebbles inside the sack which rests in my head scream in unison. ‘You can’t love two people at the same time.’ ‘I didn’t do it knowingly. It wasn’t in my control,’ I protest. ‘Oh, come on! Liar, liar, pants on fire!’ squeals one. ‘You had a rock-solid marriage, a lovely family. Didn’t you know what you were getting into?’ ‘I know. All my fault. I thought I could handle it. I loved them both, you know. I just couldn’t stop.’ One of the pebbles has a throaty voice. It’s smaller than the rest. ‘Look where this “love” has led you to. No one’s happy. Neither Shalini, nor you and I guess not even Anuradha.’ ‘Well, who knows?’ I say. ‘Maybe she has found someone. Why “maybe”? I am sure she has someone in her life by now. She is young, beautiful, successful . . . she can easily be happy. Don’t you think so?’ The pebble glances at me, scrutinizing me. ‘Yes . . . maybe. Will you be happy if she has found someone?’ I clear my throat, ‘Why not? Yes.’ ‘Sure?’ I nod. ‘Yes. I will be happy as long as she is.’ ‘Do you want to meet her?’ the pebbles chorus. ‘No. It’s over, isn’t it? Why would I want that?’ ‘Ah, come on,’ one of them says. ‘It’s what you want the most. To meet her. Isn’t it?’ I fumble for an appropriate answer. Unsuccessful. I go quiet, then. The plane has landed. I get out of the airport and spot the driver holding a placard with my name on it. I purse my lips and force a smile; a familiar weakness sweeps over me. He signals to me to wait and hurries off to get the car when I nod. I glance at the passengers leaving the airport, people gathered around the arrival gate, greeting incoming passengers: relatives and friends. I wish you too were here, waiting for me, Anuradha . . .Such feelings seem even more unreal after the way our relationship ended. But then how is one supposed to conceal one’s true feelings from oneself? How can I hide that I love you? Even after you lied to me. Even after I promised my wife, Shalini, that our affair happened in the heat of the moment and was well over. How can my feelings for you ever cease to exist? Maybe I really am the asshole that the people I love think me to be. Shalini and you. Maybe I don’t deserve love from either of you. My relationship with my wife will never go back to what it was. I have done enough to scar it and I don’t know if those scars will ever fully disappear. ‘We have struck a compromise for our children, Dhruv,’ was what Shalini told me at the dinner table one day when the kids were asleep. ‘It can never be the same again,’ she had said. Shalini is a headstrong, self-made woman who sticks to her word in her personal life as much as she does when treating her patients.

COVID-19 : The past and the future

Posted on by ashmita

Anirban Mahapatra’s COVID-19 is a meticulous dive into the pandemic that changed the 21st century world. In this excerpt, he delves into what the future could look like, and what kind of a situation we’re likely to have on our hands in the near future:

~

Envisioning what the future holds in store is like imagining what dry land is like while in a storm in the middle of the ocean. Even in the best of times, predicting the future is a risky enterprise. A devastating pandemic of this scale and severity imposes additional challenges because we have no reference point in the modern era for something like this. Off-the-cuff comments may be forgotten but writing tends to stick around and haunt the writer. If you’re too certain with your pronouncements, you’re almost certain to be wrong. If you’re too vague, no one will read what you have to say.

We are only coming to terms with the direct fallout of the pandemic, but what will be the ramifications for long-term health and planning? What will be the implications for travel, for immigration and for commerce? Will countries continue to look inward once the pandemic is over?

Certain aspects of human life and society have changed due to the immediate effects of the pandemic. It is possible, therefore, to make short-term predictions. What will happen five, ten, or fifteen years down the road because of the ongoing, cataclysmic event and our responses to it are more difficult to say.

Will there be more public interest in interest in infectious diseases and medicine? Will it become a field that attracts more of the brightest minds as engineering, information technology, finance and business management have in preceding decades? Will physicians take up more active roles in framing public policy? Will economists stress-test catastrophic economic events of this nature?

Human societies are designed to maximize connections. Over the course of a day, most of us have dozens of close interactions with other people. The design of cities, buildings, jobs, transportation and commerce keeps the human need for connection in mind more than the rare threat of a disease that spreads by human-to- human interaction.

Front cover COVID-19 Separating Fact from Fiction
COVID-19||Anirban Mahapatra

What can we say looking at the past? Based on a study of the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 1918, the historian Nancy Bristow writes, ‘If history is any guide, not much will change in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.’4 Yet, it is impossible to use history as guide, because the world has changed immensely in a century. In 1918, viruses had not been characterized. Colonial powers ruled the world and were in the middle of World War I. Commercial airline travel was non-existent. There was no Internet to allow the lay public to read research articles immediately and view daily statistics on illness and death.

… We can assume that the pandemic will irrevocably change some business practices. There will be more people working from home permanently and less business travel to meet clients and for conferences. Technological solutions that were embraced perhaps with a bit of trepidation during the pandemic will become wider habits.

Distancing is challenging in factories, warehouses, prisons, airplanes, dormitories and ships where space is maximized. Due to a premium being put on space in cities and the density of population, buildings have grown vertically. Property values have risen globally since the Great Recession. Gentrification had led to a return to economically disadvantaged areas. It is possible that there will be a reshaping of how urban spaces are used, with more people now moving outward instead of flocking to New York, Mumbai or London. But the experience of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tokyo in the first year of the pandemic has demonstrated that even within densely populated cities, measures can be taken to keep infections low. There may be a reshaping of urban societies, but it is still too early to tell. People tend to go where there are economic opportunities.

More broadly, will humans finally address the pressing problems of the day which the pandemic brought into stark relief?

Problems of inequality, poor access to healthcare and economic opportunities, and lack of equal rights are prevalent globally.

The pandemic allows humans to face difficult challenges that we have been ignoring, instead of denying or downplaying them. It gives us a chance to reframe priorities and reimagine society.

As humans we tend to focus on immediate problems. Our ancestors were good at hiding from tigers and other dangerous animals, finding caves to sleep in when it was raining, and building a fire when it was cold. Longer-term planning for problems does not come easily. This is applicable to both people individually and to us as a species.

… We keep asking ourselves, ‘When will the pandemic end?’ But we can’t mark the end as the date when it is over only for those of us who are privileged. We know that the biological pandemic will end one day. What we must also ensure is that there is an end to the social one.

~

COVID-19 is an excellent and insightful read. Anyone can read this book, and everyone should read this book.

 

The Absence of Adolescence

Posted on by ronjini

Writer – politician Muthuvel Karunanidhi is amongst the most important political leaders India has ever seen. In Karunanidhi: A Life, author A.S. Panneerselvan tells the story of the man who became a metaphor for modern Tamil Nadu, where language, empowerment, self-respect, art, literary forms and films coalesced to lend a unique vibrancy to politics.

Here is an excerpt from the chapter titled, The Absence of Adolescence.

Karunanidhi
Karunanidhi A Life || A.S. Panneerselvan

 

Like many underprivileged children, karunanidhi’s life moved straight to adulthood from childhood, bypassing the phase of indulgent adolescence. The politicization that began with the anti-Hindi agitation and exposure to the literature of the Self- Respect Movement propelled karunanidhi into becoming an activist right from his days in the second form. The police excesses and the custodial deaths of two anti-Hindi agitators, Thalamuthu and natarajan, had a profound impact on the young karunanidhi.

 

The late 1930s witnessed varied crises for all the political players: the imperial government was getting ready for the Second World War; the great Depression and its fallout was taking its toll; Mahatma gandhi’s supremacy was challenged within the Congress by the election of Subhas Chandra Bose as the party president for the second time; and the Left was emerging as a distinct political force with its leaders gaining a hold over decision-making in both the Congress as well as other popular fronts. There was also a shift in Dravidian politics with the leadership moving from the wealthy section among the non-Brahmins to Periyar and Annadurai.

 

The twists and turns of the Left’s mobilization need elaboration in order to understand how, despite its revolutionary aura, karunanidhi remained with the Dravidian Movement’s social reform agenda. in his essay, in the January–March 1984 issue of The Marxist, E.M.S. namboodiripad points out that when the Congress Socialist Party was formed in 1934, the Communist Party of india initially branded it as Social Fascist. With the Comintern’s change of policy towards the politics of the Popular Front, the indian communists’ relationship to the inC witnessed a reversal. The communists joined the Congress Socialist Party (CSP), which worked as the left wing of the Congress. Once they had joined, the Communist Party of india (CPi) accepted the CSP demand for the Constituent Assembly, which it had denounced two years before.1

 

in July 1937, the first kerala unit of the CPi was founded at a clandestine meeting in Calicut. The five persons present at the meeting were E.M.S. namboodiripad, krishna Pillai, n.C. Sekhar, k. Damodaran and S.V. ghate. The first four were members of the CSP in kerala; ghate was a CPi Central Committee member, who had come from Madras. Contacts between the CSP in kerala and the CPi had begun in 1935, when P. Sundarayya (Central Committee member of CPi, based in Madras at the time) met with EMS and krishna Pillai. Sundarayya and ghate visited kerala several times and met with the CSP leaders there. The contacts were facilitated through the national meetings of the Congress, CSP and All india kisan Sabha.

 

in 1936–1937, the cooperation between socialists and communists reached its peak. At the second congress of the CSP, held in Meerut in January 1936, a thesis was adopted which declared that there was a need to build ‘a united indian Socialist Party based on Marxism-Leninism’. in kerala the communists won control over the CSP, and for a brief period controlled the Congress there.2

 

While the Congress in kerala had a distinct leftward tilt, in Tamil nadu it was virtually under the conservative leadership of stalwarts such as C. Rajagopalachari and S. Satyamurti.

 

Thiruvarur became a microcosm of the play of these multiple forces. Smitten by Periyar’s radicalism and Annadurai’s eloquence, karunanidhi began devouring the entire oeuvre of Dravidian literature. Periyar had already published the Tamil version of The Communist Manifesto in 1937; a number of serious political publications were being published from various parts of the state. Periyar’s Kudiarasu (The Republic) was the key vehicle for dissemination as well as articulating new ideas and planning political mobilization towards an egalitarian society.3

 

While Muthuvelar and Anjugam were rejoicing at their son’s tireless learning, little did they realize what he was reading about. Textbooks were last on karunanidhi’s reading list. The extensive literature in politics was revelatory for young karunanidhi. For the first time, he realized that he too had two priceless possessions—his oratory and his pen. His first public speech was a clear pointer. it was a school competition. And karunanidhi decided to make a mark. He looked at some of the redeeming features of the so-called villains within Hindu mythology. karunanidhi spoke at length about the friendship between karna and Duryodhana—a friendship that cut across both caste and class.

 

The speech was well-received, and the teachers developed a new respect for their wayward student. But, what they did not know was the effort that went behind this oratory. karunanidhi worked on the text of the speech for nearly a week; rehearsed the speech frequently before the mirror; changed the words, similes and metaphors to get the rhythm that would alter the art of public speaking in Tamil forever.

 

He also created his own publication—Maanavanesan (Friend of students). A handwritten fortnightly of eight pages in demy size that dealt with a range of issues—from questioning orthodoxy to exploring the poetics of early Tamil. He and his friends would make about fifty copies of the magazine and circulate it for a modest fee that managed to just cover the cost of the paper. Years later, when i met him at Murasoli along with Kungumam editor Paavai Chandran for a short interview for the Illustrated Weekly of India, karunanidhi said the handwritten journal was a great learning experience. ‘We could not afford to make any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. A single mistake meant rewriting fifty copies. The sheer labour of correcting made me write a very clean first draft, without any corrections or overwriting,’ he recalled. He also took pains to mail a copy of the magazine to the leaders of the Self-Respect Movement.

 

But not all of karunanidhi’s icons were happy with the handwritten magazine. Bharathidasan, the well-known poet and a life-long supporter of the Dravidian Movement and karunanidhi, called it a waste of time and effort. He told karunanidhi: ‘The madness of expecting changes from handwritten publications can only be compared to the madness in thinking that development will happen due to spinning charkhas.’

 

Muthuvel Karunanidhi was ardent as a social reformer and unrelenting as an opposition leader. To read more about him, his life and his work, get your copy of Karunanidhi: A Life.

Battling Infertility and what they don’t tell you

Posted on by vidhi

What’s a Lemon Squeezer Doing in My Vagina? is a witty, moving and intensely personal retelling of Rohini’s five-year-long battle with infertility, capturing the indignities of medical procedures, the sting of prying questions from friends and strangers, the disproportionate burden of treatment on the woman, the everyday anxieties about wayward hormones, follicles and embryos and the overarching anxiety about the outcome of the treatment.

 

Here is an excerpt from the chapter where she first encounters a lemon squeezer.

 

I heard of ‘artificial insemination’ for the first time in a Malayalam movie when I was eight or nine years old. It was Malayalam cinema’s cult classic Dasharatham (1989), which was so ahead of its time that even now I am not sure if its time has come. A leading mainstream actor, Mohanlal, plays a rich, spoilt man-child who decides to act on a whim and have a child through surrogacy. He finds a desperate woman who needs money for her ailing footballer husband’s medical treatment and agrees to rent her womb. They draw up a contract, turn up for the procedure, and fifteen days later she is pregnant! No failed attempts, cancelled cycles or any other complications. With this movie lodged in my brain for reference, I thought fertility treatments were an easy-peasy lemon-squeezy affair. To be fair to the movie, it is not about infertility. It’s about a healthy, fertile couple who use artificial insemination for conception. It may well have happened that quickly and effortlessly in real life too. But the movie glosses over the unseemliness and hardships of the treatment. For those who have seen the movie, I hate to burst your bubble. Welcome to the world of ART.

I began our first IUI in July 2011 with the earnestness of a debutant, expecting early and prompt success. I had not dealt with sickness or physical incapacity in any significant manner until then, being blessed with a constitution that rarely fell prey to illness. I sailed through ten years of school without any noteworthy episodes of fever. My haemoglobin level typically hovered near the fourteen mark. When Ranjith caught the swine flu, despite my being in close contact with him my natural immunity provided the necessary shield against the deadly virus. My good health was my secret pride and I had taken it for granted all my life, expecting the body to tag along in whichever direction I pulled it. Therefore when we started treatment I anticipated the same level of responsiveness and performance from it. But for the first time, my body, specifically the reproductive apparatus, proved to be a terrible let-down, insolently ignoring my instructions.

The procedure itself was relatively simple with only a few key steps. The first step was pills to stimulate my ovaries to release multiple eggs. The second was follicular study. Follicles are tiny fluid-filled balloons in the ovaries that function as the home of the egg. They may expand from the size of a sesame seed (2 millimetres) to the size of a large kidney bean (18 mm to 25 mm) during the course of the menstrual cycle, eventually bursting to push the egg out. The follicles are measured at regular intervals during a cycle to ascertain if they have matured and are ready to release the egg. This is done through a transvaginal ultrasound (TVS).

I was not a big fan of TVS. It involved insertion of a long, slim plastic probe into my vagina and twisting it around to get a close look at the uterus. Magnified images of the uterus appeared on a computer screen. I was appalled the first time when the doctor covered the transducer with a condom and dipped it in lubricating gel, indicating that it had to enter an orifice in my body. I thought that scans, by definition, were non-invasive. It caused some discomfort, but it was not very painful. Eventually, I learnt to relax my muscles and spread my legs far apart to make things easier. I wished I didn’t have to get a TVS, but if I had to then I could tolerate it.

The cycle got off on the wrong foot from the very beginning. The first ultrasound showed only one big-enough follicular blob (at 13 mm). The other four or five follicles were too small, indicating they might not reach maturity. This meant I might have only one egg despite taking drugs to stimulate the release of many.

In the next ultrasound, my ovarian plight did not show improvement. The lead follicle was still only at 15 mm (way below the 18 mm mark of maturity) and the others had not grown at all, looking like they were giving up on ovulation altogether.

There were no outward symptoms to show if the follicles were fattening or dying (this is true for most reproductive processes). So at every ultrasound I went in expecting miracle growth, only to be told that my seeds were lagging poorly behind. I felt helpless at the response from my body because there was nothing I could do to expand the follicles. If it were an outwardly manifest condition I could have applied my inner reserves of resolve and determination to improve the outcomes, in the same way that I would do daily exercise and physiotherapy to regain strength in an injured leg. But my action, or inaction, had no bearing on the ungovernable follicles.

We waited a couple of more days and did a third ultrasound. This time the news was worse. The lead follicle had ruptured; it hadn’t waited for the others to catch up or even to reach its own full maturity. There was nothing left to do but to hurriedly put the sperm inside the uterus since an egg (presumably underdeveloped) had arrived and was waiting. The sperm transfer was scheduled for the same day.

what’s a lemon squeezer doing in my vagina | Rohini S. Rajagopal

I rang up my manager and said I would be taking the day off to address a personal emergency. An hour later, Ranjith drove in from his office to give a semen sample. He came in, gave the semen sample and left. He did not stay any longer because he had meetings that could not be rescheduled at such short notice.

I had come to the clinic at eight in the morning assuming I would just pop in for the ultrasound and pop out. An easy day with only the bother of TVS. But when I heard that I would have to stay back for the IUI, I inwardly experienced a mini-heart attack. Early on, while describing the procedure, Dr Leela had mentioned that the sperm would be injected inside the uterus using a catheter. Having heard the words ‘inject’ and ‘catheter’ in conjunction with my vagina, I thought it best to look up the process in detail on the Internet. One of the first search results showed that during an IUI the doctor uses a ‘speculum’ to pass the catheter into the uterus. It was a surgical instrument inserted inside the vagina or anus to dilate the area and give the doctor a better view. I did a quick search on Google Images to know what it looked like. The photos that flashed on my screen sent ripples of shock through

my system. It looked like the stainless-steel lemon squeezer found in a kitchen. It was made of metal and about the same size as the kitchen tool. It had two blades to widen and hold open the vagina and a third handle with a screw to lock the instrument into place.

What’s a Lemon Squeezer Doing in my Vagina offers a no-holds-barred view of Rohini S. Rajagopal’s circuitous and highly bumpy road to motherhood.

Jude Sequeira’s drunken escapades in Bombay’s Orlem

Posted on by vanyajaiswal

Philomena Sequeira knows what she wants by the time she turns fourteen. Her father wants something else. Her neighbours deal with adultery, abandonment and abuse, by hoping for a place in heaven.

Life is unyielding for the tenants of the rundown Obrigado Mansion in Orlem, a Roman Catholic parish in suburban Bombay. They grapple with love, loss and sin, surrounded by abused wives and repressed widows, alcoholic husbands and dubious evangelists, angry teenagers and ambivalent priests, all struggling to make sense of circumstances they have no control over.

Gods and Ends takes up multiple threads of individual stories to create a larger picture of darkness beneath a seemingly placid surface. It is about intersecting lives struggling to accept change as homes turn into prisons. This is a book about invisible people in a city of millions, and the claustrophobia they rarely manage to escape from.

**

The well appeared to have been there forever, sunk into the earth at a time when there couldn’t have been too many people around to use it. And yet, as any careful observer might have noticed, it had once been cared for, its sides carefully scoured, solid stone steps marking circles as they disappeared into its gloomy depths. Until the outer wall collapsed, sliding slowly into the murky green water, there may have been a few informal meetings held nearby. Some of the early residents of Orlem may well have stopped to chat around it on sunny mornings, to discuss dissolute husbands or the latest scandal from the goan villages they came from, while stooping down to draw water.

On the night of 24 December, only one voice was heard. It was between 1 and 2 a.m., and the water lay undisturbed, its opaque surface broken only by lethargic leaves slipping, sliding, gliding down from laburnum trees looming darkly above and around the well. The only other sound came from an unsteady stream of urine pattering down, over the ruined edge, through a space where the wall once stood.

front cover of Gods and Ends
Gods and Ends || Lindsay Pereira

 

‘Come from England, come from Scotland, come from Ireland,’ the voice slurred tunelessly. ‘Looking out for a pleasant holiday? Come to Bombay, meri hai.’

Jude Sequeira pissed his cares away. He was dimly aware about urinating into a source of drinking water for some of his neighbours, but was too drunk to care. The half bottle of cheap whisky he had consumed lay volatile in his stomach, warming him, while making his head swim ever so gently. The song he was singing continued to pour out of him, its lyrics a jumble. After singing it twice, he looked up and stopped in awe. Above him, in a hole cut out through the trees that formed a canopy, a few stars twinkled brightly. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen stars.

Smiling to himself, he shook his penis half-heartedly, the last few drops wetting his toes. As he tried to zip up, something caught his eye. A mouse? A cat? Swaying slightly, he turned. There was a sudden moment of clarity when he recognized the figure standing before him. His lips moved as he struggled to articulate something that seemed to be just out of reach. Teetering for a few seconds, suddenly on the brink of sobriety, he slipped. The splash echoed briefly before receding into the night. The waters closed over, stifling a scream before it reached his throat. As he went down, Jude found the name he was looking for.

On the ground above, all that remained were his slippers: a pair of grimy Bata chappals, their blue straps long faded. In time, a milky sun rose, its appearance heralded by noisy sparrows.

**

Why are so many Indian women out of the labour force?

Posted on by ashmita

Promises of gender equality and justice have been made, repeatedly. They have failed repeatedly. The roots of misogyny form the foundations of our civil society, and the essays in Her Right to Equality raise crucial questions about the status of gender equality in our country. It scrutinizes institutions that are meant to safeguard the rights of women and minorities, and sheds light on the colossal amount of work that needs to be done. This is an excerpt from the volume:

 

A great deal of focus in this discussion is on the decline. However, an equally (if not more) important issue is the persistently low level of women’s LFPR in India, lower than our other South Asian neighbours, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. In joint work with Naila Kabeer, we explore factors that shape the low level. Our results are based on a large primary household survey in seven districts in West Bengal. We collect data on all the indicators included in the official surveys, and on additional variables that are usually not included in surveys. Since we wanted to focus on which specific internal constraints inhibit women from working, we asked specific questions on whether they were primarily responsible for childcare, for elderly care, for standard domestic chores (cooking, washing clothes, etc.), and if they covered their heads/faces always, sometimes, or never. The latter is taken as a proxy for cultural conservatism; indeed, internationally, the fact of women covering their faces in public spaces is often criticized as an oppressive practice. Of course, the context in the West is different in that covering heads/faces is associated with being Muslim. In India, the practice is followed by both Hindus and Muslims, and in recognition of that, we label it more broadly as ‘veiling’, and not as wearing a burqa or hijab. We implemented simple changes to the official survey questionnaires in order to get better estimates of women’s work that lie in the grey zone. Accordingly, our estimates are higher than official estimates, but even with improved measurement, a little over half (52 per cent) get counted as ‘working’. Which means that participation in work is low, even after work in the grey zone is included.

 

The Critical Role of Domestic Chores

front cover Her Right to Equality
Her Right to Equality||Nisha Agrawal

We then investigated the main constraints to women’s ability to work. Our main findings were that women being primarily responsible for routine domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning and household maintenance, over and above the standard explanations in the literature (age, location, education, marriage and so on) as well as elderly care responsibilities, lowers their probability of working. If domestic chores emerge as an important determinant of women’s labour force participation, after controlling for the standard explanatory factors, the question that arises is this: to what extent do the low LFPRs found in India in particular, but in South Asia and MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries more broadly, reflect international differences in women’s involvement in housework? There is some indicative evidence that indeed, in these regions, women spend more time on unpaid care work, broadly defined (including care of persons, housework or other voluntary care work), relative to a range of other developing and developed countries in the world. According to OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) data, in 2014, the female-to-male ratio of time devoted to unpaid care work was 10.25 and 9.83 in Pakistan and India respectively—the two countries with the lowest female LFPRs within South Asia—compared to 1.85 in the UK and 1.61 in the US. Factors traditionally viewed as cultural norms that constrain women’s participation in paid work, such as the practice of veiling or adherence to Islam, are insignificant in our analysis after the conventional variables have been accounted for. Given that the primary responsibility of domestic chores falls on the woman, we suggest that the conventional definition of cultural norms needs to be revised and shifted to focus on the real culprit, viz., the cultural norm that places the burden of domestic chores almost exclusively on women.

 

Is There an Unmet Demand for Work?

Do women really want to participate in paid work, or have they either internalized the male breadwinner model which relegates them to take care of the home and the family? What about the ‘income effect’, according to which women work only if necessary for economic reasons, and withdraw from work as soon as they don’t need to? What about the marriage penalty, that is, women dropping out of the labour force once they are married? Thus, women’s work might be a sign of economic compulsions of trying make two ends meet rather than an expression of their desire for economic independence. We explore the evidence for this in our survey. Married women are less likely to be working than unmarried women, but marriage in India is near universal (making marriage the most common career choice for women), and asking women to choose either marriage or paid work is not a fair or realistic choice. We asked women who were currently not working if they would accept paid work if it was made available at or near their homes; 73.5 per cent said ‘yes’. When questioned further, 18.7 per cent expressed a preference for regular full-time work, 7.8 per cent for regular part-time work; 67.8 per cent for occasional full-time work and 5.78 per cent for occasional parttime work. It would appear that there was indeed a major unmet demand for paid work, whether regular or occasional, full-time or part-time, as long as the work in question was compatible with their domestic responsibilities. Based on this, we suggest that being out of the labour force is less a matter of choice for large numbers of women, and more a reflection of the demands of unpaid domestic responsibilities.

~

Her Right to Equality is an urgent and meticulous study of how far we have come in terms of gender justice, and how far we need to go.

 

The dirty trail of money

Posted on by ashmita

While much has been read and said about Vijay Mallya and his constant hide-and-seek with government authorities, details remain either inaccessible or too obfuscated. Escaped is a deep dive into the deeds and misdemeanours of the magnate, and what lies beneath the scaffolding of a billionaire-gone-wrong. Here is an excerpt:

 

The more famous pad of the Mallyas is the palatial country house in Tewin village, Hertfordshire, 20 miles north of London. The quintessential English village dates back to the Anglo-Saxon times, boasts of a picturesque countryside rich in flora and fauna and has a population of barely 2000.

Mallya’s property Ladywalk was previously owned and occupied by Anthony Hamilton, father of F1 champion Lewis Hamilton, and hence has always been the cynosure of all eyes in the sleepy village.

Though not much is visible from the main entrance, a public footpath runs around the property, providing an unrestricted view of the enormous spread that includes the main house Ladywalk and a lodge called Bramble Lodge with plenty of land for Mallya’s five dogs — Bichon lapdogs Elsa and Daisy, golden retrievers Luna and Bella and a St Bernard called Spirit — to play chase.

Security at Ladywalk is a priority and several CCTV cameras are in operation 24×7 at various entry and exit points along the periphery of the extensive property. Guards, dressed in black and armed with iPads and binoculars, are ever vigilant, and more so for snoopy scribes.

The large modern house sits on 30 acres of land and boasts of swimming pools, tennis courts and several outhouses. The two-year renovation of the property saw a continuous flow of architects, landscape artists, builders and gardeners. But what the locals most look forward to is the plethora of supercars that take to the narrow roads leading to Queen Hoo Lane. A sure sign that the party king is at home!

Front cover Escaped
Escaped||Danish Khan, Ruhi Khan

The story begins on 11 June 2014. This property was already on the market through estate agents Savills and Knight Frank with at least one prospective buyer lined up. Mallya paid Hamilton a visit, instantly fell in love with the property and immediately made an offer. An offer that Anthony Hamilton could not refuse. So desperate was Mallya to make this his new home that a written agreement between the two was signed that day, thus sealing the fate of this property.

Interestingly, this agreement specified the ‘Buyer’ as: ‘Dr Vijay Mallya and/or, Miss Leena Vijay Mallya, Miss Tanya Vijay Mallya, Mr Siddhartha Vijay Mallya OR to his/their order’. Mallya’s Cornwall Terrace address in London was listed as the residential address. The deal was signed for a whopping £13 million and strangely no deposit was taken by Hamilton on that day.

On 11 June 2014, Anthony Hamilton signed as the ‘seller’, witnessed by Force India’s Deputy Head Robert Fernley, and Mallya signed the agreement under his own name as a ‘buyer’, witnessed by his chartered accountant Dr Lakshmi Kanthan.

The only signature on the preliminary agreement under the ‘buyer’ was that of Mallya.

None of his children had accompanied him to view the property and there is no evidence to suggest that they were aware that they were put as buyers then or had authorized Mallya to purchase the property on their behalf.

This property has all the hallmarks of being owned and occupied by Mallya. A fleet of supercars making their way down the drive, hordes of people descending to party all night long and a constant delivery of goods and services.

Yet when we dig deeper into the ownership, Vijay Mallya is a phantom lurking everywhere yet really nowhere.

Ladywalk is propped up on a complex structure of ownership that defines the existence of many such marquee properties in the UK.

Mallya has never disputed claims that he bought his new family home with the intention of securing it for his son and two daughters.

Though he has often nonchalantly challenged reporters to prove that the Ladywalk property was bought by him through ill-gotten money.

If one can lawfully hide the real ownership and flow of funds, why wouldn’t billionaires exercise the option and bask in the security this provides them?

~

Danish Khan and Ruhi Khan’s book is going to keep you at the very edge of your seats.

Poetry for a broken world

Posted on by ashmita

In times of darkness, there has and will always be poetry. Ranjit Hoskote’s Hunchprose is an intimate crafting of vulnerability, beauty, and the feeling of estrangement that accompanies long durations of social anxiety. Here is an excerpt from the eponymous poem, and a few others:

 

Hunchprose

He calls me Hunchprose but what’s a word

between murderous rivals?
Across from me he strops his fine blade

smooth talker barefaced liar pissfart

teller of tall tales who wraps you up
in his flying carpet serves you snake oil
carries off the princess every time.
And I what can I offer you except
fraying knots coiled riddles scrolled bones
keys to doors that were carted away by raiders

betrayed by splayed light and early snow.
Lost doors I could have opened with my breath.
Call me Hunchpraise. I bend over my inkdrift words.

And when I spring back up I sting.

 

Sidi Mubarak Bombay
(1820–1885)

I should go home now, but I forget where that is.

 

A child, I was sold for a length of cotton and hammered into a link in a

chain of caravans. Taken across the sea in a dhow. The Arab slavers had

been generous with the whip. The Gujarati merchant who bought me

had a sense of humour. He called me Mubarak, Blessed.

 

Many years I worked for him in Bombay. City of opium warehouses.

City of cotton godowns. City of spice stores. City of jahazis, munshis,

khalasis, sarafs, bhishtis, sepoys that was the only family I knew. So I

called myself Bombay.

 

My seth died, leaving instructions that I was to be freed. I went back

to Zanzibar and built a house. In Bombay I was a Sidi, a man from

the Zanj, a man the colour of night. In Zanzibar I spoke Gujarati,

Hindustani, two words of English. Stuttered in Kiswahili. But this

new–old country spoke to me in rhymes of soil, sand, river, jungle. It

brought me gold. Coral. Also pearls.

 

Speke Sahib, Bwana Speke, wanted me to be his guide. Then Burton

Front cover Hunchprose
Hunchprose||Ranjit Hoskote

Sahib came. Bwana Burton. Then Bwana Stanley. Bwana Speke was

looking for the source of the Nile. So were they all. I was their compass

and their sextant. With them, I looked for the source of the Nile.

 

Once, we nearly died. As if the journey was cursed. Burton Sahib

vomiting all the time. Bwana Speke going blind, his eyes gummy and

swollen with too much dreaming. At last, Ujiji. The lake rippled from

one end of the world to the other. Wide as a sea cradled in a giant’s

palm. God forgive us, we tried to cross it. Bwana Speke lost his hearing.

A beetle had crawled into his ear. What afrit possessed him I don’t

know, but he tried to get it out with a knife. No boats large enough to

cross that lake. Later, I crossed Africa from coast to coast. Walked more

than any other man alive. Logged six thousand miles, most of it on foot,

match that if you can. Sometimes donkeys.

 

Long after I left Bombay and went back to Zanzibar, its smells followed

me. Freshly chopped garlic, fenugreek, heeng, pepper, cinnamon,

bombil drying in a sharp wind. ‘Bombil,’ I would say to myself, sitting

on my stoop, looking across the sea, rolling the syllables in my mouth.

‘Bombil, surmai, bangda, rawas.’ The masala-thick pungency of one fish

after another after another would settle on my tongue. My neighbours

must have thought I was chanting spells.

 

Voice

I’d snatched at every straw
and thought you’d got it right at last:

                swallowing swords
when you could so easily have been

                    sewing buttons

I should have told myself:

                  Be careful what you wish for

before you stropped yourself

into a voice

            that could call down rain
rap out commandments

            needle the air with prophecies

            or draw it into a bowstring

            snatch breath away

 

Why did you call down
this darkness on yourself?

Where
in this garden of unsealed tombs

                                         did we lose our serenades?

 

Jallianwala Bagh and the 102 years of its history

Posted on by ashmita

V.N. Datta’s book remains relevant and immediate to this day. While his research documents the events of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, its history, context and aftermath, it also reveals the failure of larger institutions of power and control. Here is an excerpt from the introduction to the 2021 edition:

 

In April 2019, 100 years after the massacre, the nation remembered Jallianwala Bagh as a major historical event in the long tale of Indian nationalism and independence. Jallianwala Bagh has become an integral part of the grand saga of the nation’s history. Yet, not all local memories match the prevailing narrative; and here Datta’s book reminds us not to be swayed by the nationalist frenzy.

As preparations were underway for the centenary commemoration, I walked into Jallianwala Bagh intending to unearth its hidden histories. I met a Sikh policeman at the gate who led me to the narrow ‘Historical Lane’ to the Bagh. He told me that Dyer had brought guns and troops through this constricted passage to shoot at the innocent crowd that had assembled in the Bagh on 13 April, the day of the Baisakhi mela, which is celebrated with much fanfare in Punjab. ‘There were no exit points,’ he says. ‘People in panic ran to the walls to escape. They jumped into the khoo [well].’

While in the Bagh, I was taken over by mixed feelings. It looked like an insignificant garden with some old trees abutting the residential buildings at the back. However, there was something eerie about the place. The very ordinariness of the site was almost shocking in view of the violence that occurred there. Of course, there are commemorative structures that are not ordinary. To the right is the amar jyoti, the eternal flame. The pedestal is inscribed with the words Vande Mataram, praise to the motherland. There is also an old samadhi with a dome. At the centre of the Bagh stands an impressive oblong-shaped cenotaph. And to its right is the deadly khoo. Further down is the passage to the Martyrs’ Gallery and a museum. The bullet-ridden wall represents the horror that occurred here. The gaping marks are a tragic testimony to Dyer’s savagery in the Bagh. They are all too visible. The plaque says,

The wall has its own historic significance as it has thirty-six bullet marks which can be easily seen at present and these were fired into the crowd by the order of General Dyer. Moreover, no warning was given to disperse before Dyer opened fire which [sic] was gathered here against the Rowlatt Act. One Thousand Six Hundred and Fifty Rounds were fired.

…The Bagh shapes a national memory and constructs a national past through a patchwork of myth and history, fact and fiction. As Madan Lal Vij, the city’s historian, told me, ‘After the kand [scandalous episode], Jallianwala Bagh became a historic garden and a national memorial.’ The city’s local tragedy is fashioned as a national crisis through the idea of shahadat, martyrdom. A white flame-like sculpture stands with faces of martyrs and all their names engraved below. The compound surrounding Jallianwala Bagh is today part of a larger heritage area that includes the Golden Temple and the old Town Hall. The Congress narrative, as shown on the plaque, forges a direct connection between the massacre and the Rowlatt Act.

Front cover Jallianwala Bagh
Jallianwala Bagh||V.N. Datta

The construction of a definitive history in Jallianwala Bagh obfuscates the complex truths of the massacre, which contain unresolved contradictions and ambiguities. One such ambiguity is the nationalist attempt to establish an unmediated relationship between the crowd in the Bagh and the anti-Rowlatt Act protests. However, the irony is that to present the crowd as agitators alone would authenticate the claims of Dyer and official histories and do an injustice to the plural memories and differentiated experiences of the victims. I asked the locals to share their memories. ‘It was a random crowd, some were playing cards, others had come to celebrate the Baisakhi mela,’ says the octogenarian Om Prakash Seth from Katra Ahluwalia. ‘It was not a political meeting,’ adds Trilok Chand, one of the oldest booksellers at Hall Bazaar. Udham Singh’s history in the Bagh presents yet another dilemma. It is doubtful whether he was ever present in the Bagh at the time of the massacre. Doubtless, Jallianwala Bagh is primarily dominated by the story of Gandhi’s satyagraha and Udham Singh’s martyrdom.

The tailored history of the Bagh tends to ignore the diverse echoes and voices. We know little about the people who were in the Bagh and what they were up to. Popular memories too are shifting. Dyer’s shooting is no longer central to their recollections. People feel excluded from the mainstream history of Jallianwala Bagh. The locals see themselves as victims of a state that has let them down consistently since 1919.

…My journey to Amritsar tracing the memories of Jallianwala Bagh was greatly enriched by Datta’s insights and revelations. Even after the 100th year of commemoration, his work becomes all the more immediate. As a historian writing in the 1960s, his crafting of an intricate narrative and analysis of 1919, uncomfortably entangled with local and national histories, is no mean feat. Recognized as a classic across the global community of scholars, V.N. Datta’s Jallianwala Bagh deserves a wider readership for generations to come.

Some books never cease to remain relevant. Jallianwala Bagh is one such.

 

 

 

 

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